The diffusion of these attitudes meant first of all a widespread re-evaluation of the oral poetic tradition, especially Spain’s historical ballads, or romances. Agust´ın Dura´n (1789–1862) spurred interest by publishing his carefully compiled ballad collections in a series of well-received volumes beginning in 1828. There was broad agreement among writers and critics that the romancero constituted, in the words of Antonio Alcala´ Galiano (1789–1865), “una poes´ıa nacional y natural de consiguiente” (“a national and therefore a natural poetry”).1 This sense that the traditional ballads expressed a unique, unmediated national essence rapidly enhanced their aesthetic value in lettered culture; by the 1830s Spanish poets were creating their own romances, adopting the sharp contrasts, dramatic situations, and evocative imagery of the traditional ballads.
Despite historicist Romanticism’s nostalgia for medieval organicism, its emphasis on the subjective, on imagination and emotion as the essence of the “poetic,” resonated with evolving economic and political formations based on the individual. When Dura´n in his influential Discurso defined the mission of Romantic poetry as the representation of “la historia del hombre interior considerado como individuo” (“the history of the inner
´ 1 Antonio Alcala´ Galiano, “Pro´ logo” to El moro expo´sito, by Angel Saavedra, duque
De Rivas (1834 ). In El romanticismo espan˜ol. Documentos. Ed. Ricardo Navas Ruiz
(Salamanca: Editorial Anaya, 1971), p. 113 .
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Man considered as an individual”),2 he indicated that the interiority of the individual subject had become the basis of the new aesthetic. This orientation toward expanded poetic exploration of the inner self linked up with the more liberal version of Romanticism that emerged in the mid 1830s, a period of militant liberal reform that abolished the legal basis of aristocratic and ecclesiastical privilege and established a constitutional monarchy. The liberatory desire associated with the struggle to dismantle the ancien regime reached its fullest lyrical expression in the poetry of Jose de Espronceda, which focused on the angst resulting from the failure of the individual’s effort to realize self-generated visions of human possibility. Less extreme versions of this theme of disillusionment with an oppressive reality became a staple of Spanish Romantic poetry, as did the exploration of the inner realms of feeling and fantasy. The emphasis on the inner self had another effect related to modernization: as poetry came to be seen as the spontaneous expression of the heart and the imagination, it provided women a path to authorship that was compatible with both their lack of formal education and their socially assigned link to emotionality. Thus, with Romanticism, Spanish women made their appearance in literary history as regular participants in the production first of poetry, and then of other genres.3
In his own time and after, Jose de Espronceda (1808-1842) was seen as the preeminent Romantic poet of Spain. As a youth Espronceda was trained in Neoclassical poetics by Alberto Lista (1775-1848). However, the teenaged poet embroiled himself in liberal conspiracies against the absolutist regime of Fernando VII and in 1827 was sent out of Spain by his family to avoid trouble. Upon his return after Fernando’s death, he initiated a new poetics with the publication of “La cancion del pirata” (“The Pirate’s Song,” 1835). Using varied metric forms to suggest the dynamism of an outlaw subject only to his own will, Espronceda’s pirate sings joyously of unfettered individual liberty. The poet experimented further with this technique of using the perspective of marginalized figures to criticize social hypocrisy and injustice in four additional canciones: “El mendigo” (“The Beggar”), “El reo de muerte” (“The Condemned Prisoner”), “El verdugo” (“The Executioner”), and “El canto del cosaco” (“The Song of the Cossack”).
In the years between 1835 and 1840, when a collection of his poetry was published, Espronceda also elaborated a Romantic metaphysics of the self in a series of love elegies. The basic pattern was set in “A una estrella” (“To a Star”), in which the lyrical speaker reads into the faint
2 Agust´ın Duran, Discurso sobre el influjo que ha tenido la critica moderna en la decadencia
Del teatro antiguo espanol... In Navas Ruiz, ed., El romanticismo espanol, p. 85.
3 Susan Kirkpatrick, Las romdnticas. Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-1850
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
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Light of a small star the cosmic parallel to the eclipse of his own bright hopes and illusions, dashed in the encounter with a beloved woman. The pain of what is presented as the inevitable abyss between the projections of the desirous imagination and the real world leads the speaker to despairing indifference: “no me importa salvarme o zozobrar” (“I don’t care whether I survive or founder”). In “A Jarifa en una org´ıa” (“To Jarifa in an Orgy”), another lyrical monologue in which the speaker addresses a prostitute, the whore becomes a privileged metaphor for the object world in which the subject attempts and inevitably fails to realize his infinite desires. The pain of frustration drives the speaker to the brothel, but because desire can be neither stilled nor satisfied, the poem itself re-enacts an ever-repeated sequence of emotions - desire, illusion, disappointment, and disgust. Espronceda’s conception of the fundamental paradigm of human experience, an element that links his work with other important manifestations of European Romanticism, is epitomized in the canto to Teresa, which despite its inclusion in his epic poem, El diablo mundo (“The Devil World”), stands on its own as an elegy to Teresa Mancha, the poet’s former lover and mother of his daughter.
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