It is difficult to define Realist poetry in this period, even if it is done in a fashion as provisional and methodological as that proposed by Urrutia: “La poes´ıa realista es la que se escribe entre el final del romanticismo y

This chapter has been translated from the Spanish by Matthieu Raillard.

1 Russell P. Sebold, “Sobre Campoamor y sus lecciones de realidad.” In La perduracion

De la modalidad cldsica. Poesia y prosa de los siglos XVIII a XIX (Salamanca: Ediciones

Universidad, 2001), p. 268.

2 Jorge Urrutia, Poesia espanola del siglo XIX (Madrid: Catedra, 1995).

3 Marta Palenque, Elpoeta yel burgues (poesia y publico, 1850-1900) (Seville: Alfar, 1990).

4 Joaqu´ın Marco, “El tren expreso y el falso realismo de Campoamor.” Revista de Literatura

23 (1963), pp. 107-117.

448

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Poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century 449

La aparicio´n de la poes´ıa moderna: nuevos planteamientos del 98, mod-ernismo, vanguardia” (“Realist poetry is the poetry written between the end of Romanticism and the arrival of modern poetry: the new problems raised by the generation of 98, Modernism, the vanguard”).5 In reality, Romanticism does not disappear in 1849 with the publication of Ferna´n Caballero’s novel, La gaviota (“The Seagull”); on the contrary, it is more reasonable to view what we call Realism as one of the basic components of Romanticism. What is Romanticism if not the perception of contrasts between reality and the ideal and the analysis and artistic interpretation of that reality? Critics have sought, in vain, dates and clues that would clearly mark the end of Romanticism. In 1837 Campoamor published an article that has been given undue importance as heralding the beginnings of an anti-Romantic reaction (“Acerca del estado actual de nuestra poes´ıa” [“Regarding the State of Today’s Poetry”] No me olvides, 10 December 1837). A close reading of this article, however, shows that, instead of rejecting the new literature, Campoamor joins the ranks of conservative Romanticism, since he invokes Caldero´n and displays his patriotic and nationalist spirit, all the while favoring a sentimental kind of Romanticism. He rejects truculent Romanticism and its more juvenile aspects, along with the new dress styles and antisocial behavior associated with it. The same attitude was apparent when Mesonero Romanos wrote in that same year in the Semanario Pintoresco his article “El romanticismo y los roma´nticos” (“Romanticism and the Romantics”). These supposedly anti-Romantic articles belong in the same ideological context and are noted for their need to define a literature that is both new and national. The same could be said for Mart´ınez de la Rosa’s Po e´tica (“Poetics,” 1831).

At the other end of the political spectrum one finds in Mariano Jose´ de Larra’s article “Literatura” (“Literature”), written in January of 1836, a veritable manifesto for liberal Romanticism. Campoamor and Larra share, without the latter knowing it, a preoccupation with renovating poetic language. Larra said, in 1836: “Ahora bien, marchar en ideolog´ıa, en metaf´ısica, en ciencias exactas y naturales, en pol´ıtica. . . y pretender estacionarse en la lengua que ha de ser la expresio´n de estos mismos progresos, perdo´nennos los sen˜ ores puristas, es haber perdido la cabeza” (“Now, going forward in ideology, metaphysics, in exact and natural sciences, in politics. . . and standing still with the very language that is the expression of these same advances, with all due respect to the purists, is to have lost our mind”). Campoamor, in his article from No me olvides

5 Jorge Urrutia, “El camino cerrado de Gaspar Nu´n˜ez de Arce.” Anales de Literatura Espan˜ ola de la Universidad de Alicante 2 (1983), p. 492.

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450 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century

Presented what would become the crux of his poetics: poetic language should be a faithful reflection of reality, precise in its use of adjectives and loyal to scientific observations of reality.

Another text that has been viewed asmarking the endof Romanticism is Juan Valera’s essay “Del romanticismo en Espan˜a y de Espronceda” (“On Romanticism in Spain and On Espronceda,” 1854), in which he demonstrates preoccupations of a Romantic nature with respect to the ballad and national literature. These preoccupations are still relevant after the articles of Larra, Campoamor, and Mesonero. In 1867, Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, author of Los ecos nacionales (“National Echoes,” 1849), published La Arcadia moderna. Coleccio´n de e´glogas e idilios realistas y de epigramas (“Modern Arcadia. Collection of Eclogues, Realist Idylls and Epigrams”). In using the label “Realist,” Ruiz Aguilera is not moving against Romantic esthetics, but rather that of classicism: “Las dr´ıadas y hamadr´ıadas, las potamides y neliadas, las nereidas y napeas discurren por las cimas del parnaso como sombras de un mundo muerto, a las que el actual, que presume de piadoso, no dejara´ de conceder sepultura para in eternum” (“The Dryads and Hamadryads, the Potamides and Neliads, the Nereids and Napeas dwell amongst the peaks of Parnassus like shadows of a dead world, shadows that the real world, in an effort to appear faithful, cannot abandon and put to rest forever” [vii]). To be in agreement with the Romantic character of these idylls and Realist eclogues, the author of Ecos nacionales thus proclaims that the social duty of the poet “ahora como siempre, se inspira adema´s de en los sentimientos personales, en los sentimientos, en las ideas, en las costumbres y en los intereses gene-rosos de su e´poca, y, heraldo del porvenir, marcha delante de la columna de fuego que alumbra el camino de la humanidad” (“now, as always, is inspired by more than personal emotions, emotions, ideas, by the customs and interests of his time, and as herald of the future, walks ahead of the column of fire that sheds light on the path of humanity” [xi]). Even though not as programmatic, this text does not differ much from the end of Larra’s article, in which he proclaimed his support for a true and useful literature, capable of encompassing all of human experience as well as the realities of science: “una literatura hija de la experiencia y de la historia y faro por tanto del porvenir, estudiosa, analizadora, filoso´fica, profunda, pensa´ndolo todo, dicie´ndolo todo en prosa, en verso” (“a literature born from experience and history, a beacon for the future, studious, analyzing, philosophical, profound, reflecting on and saying all, in prose, in verse”). We find a period of Romantic evolution in which liberal Romanticism faces its conservative counterpart, and in which the manifestations in favor of Realism, the representation of reality, and the incorporation of language and new scientific reality are viewed as being anticlassicist.

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century 453 And materialism. The moral abyss created by reason and a possible lack of religious beliefs is accompanied in Gritos del combate by attacks leveled at Darwinist and scientific philosophies, as well as at bloody

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 446 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century One of the most notable, and not to be forgotten, characteristics of Spanish nineteenth-century drama is its penchant for parody, satire, and slapstick. High Art became, naturally, the subject of literary discourse, theatre criticism, and

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