Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Romanticism, Influence, and the Rimas

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Life, Works, and Context (1836–1870)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870) was a short-lived but intense writer. His works include the Legends (narrations combining costumbrismo prose, fantasy, and mystery) and the Rhymes (poems). The poems appeared sporadically while he lived (between 1857 and 1868), but his friends collected them for the first time in an edition of 1871, shortly after his death. Later, in 1914, another edition appeared, based on Bécquer's own handwritten manuscript, found within his Book of the Sparrows, containing 79 poems and a different arrangement.

Bécquer is situated at a moment of transition from Romanticism to Realism. His themes and sensibility often lead him to be considered a post-romantic author, remote from the grandiose Romanticism of Espronceda or Zorrilla.

Sources of Bécquer's Originality

His originality is based on the combination of two main influences:

• The European Tradition: English Romantic poets like Byron and the German Heine.
• The Spanish Tradition: Andalusian folk poetry, which he chose because, in his own words, it was a "natural poetry, short, dry, springing like an electric spark from the soul, bare of artifice."

Bécquer's Poetic Theory

Bécquer explained his ideas about poetry in many writings (letters, prologues, etc.). According to him, the poetic echo is real, independent, and prior to the poem, and the poem is generated by emotion. The poet must evoke and recreate, or mold (combining inspiration and technique), that emotion through language, which is always insufficient. For Bécquer, beauty lies especially in poetry, mystery, love, and women.

Formal Characteristics of the Rimas

In the formal aspect, the Rimas are characterized by simplicity and authenticity: feeling is sonority. It is expressed through gentle suggestion, playing with silences, truncated endings, and a scarcity of adjectives, which gives greater importance to the few that appear.

They often present an apostrophic structure: the lyrical subject challenges poetry itself, or his beloved. Despite the apparent simplicity, there is careful preparation, with numerous rhetorical devices, especially of a constructive type, such as:

• Contrasts
• Anaphora
• Parallelism (favoring rhythmic and expressive symmetries)

Metaphors (including symbols) and comparisons also abound, especially related to nature and the sensory domain (music, shapes, colors—especially black and gold, etc.). The tension added by hyperbaton and emotional enjambments are central elements. The emotional intensity of the poem is also reinforced by typically Romantic resources such as suspension points (...), exclamations, or interrogations.

Metric Simplicity

The metrics also tend toward simplicity, where assonance prevails. The soft musicality of the poems is achieved through rather brief verses with varied meters (5, 7, 8, 11 syllables, etc.) and a range of stanzas, from the silva to the romance (ballad). The frequent use of broken-foot verses, closing the stanzas, marks the rhythm and concentrates the significant matter.