Gustavo Adolfo Becquer Biography

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

(Gustavo Adolfo Domínguez Bastida; Seville, 1836-Madrid, 1870) Spanish poet.Along with Rosalía de Castro, he is the highest representative of post-romantic poetry, a trend that had as distinctive features the intimate theme and an apparent expressive simplicity, far from the vehemence rhetoric of romanticism.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (detail of a portrait made by his brother Valeriano, c.1862)

Bécquer's work exerted a strong He influenced later figures such as Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and the poets of the generation of '27, and critics judge him to be the initiator of contemporary Spanish poetry.But more than a great name in literary history, Bécquer is above all a living poet, popular in every sense of the word, whose verses, with a moving voice and winged beauty, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the predilection of millions of readers..

Biography

Son and brother of painters, he was orphaned at the age of ten and lived his childhood and adolescence in Seville, where he studied humanities and painting.In 1854 he moved to Madrid, with the intention of making a literary career.However, success did not smile at him; his ambitious project to write a History of the temples of Spain was a failure, and he only managed to publish one volume, years later.In order to live, he had to dedicate himself to journalism and make adaptations of foreign plays, mainly French, in collaboration with his friend Luis García Luna, both adopting the pseudonym "Adolfo García".

The content of rhymes has been divided into four groups: the first (rhymes I to XI) is a reflection on poetry and literary creation; the second (XII to XXIX) deals with love and its effects on the soul of the poet; in the poems of the third group (XXX to LI), heartbreak and disappointment predominate; and those in the fourth (LII to LXXXVI) show the poet facing death, disappointed in love and the world.The Rhymes are usually presented preceded by the "Symphonic Introduction" that, probably, Bécquer prepared as a prologue to all his work.

His prose stands out, like his poetry, for the great musicality and simplicity of expression, full of sensitivity; following in the footsteps of E.T.A.Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, their Legends recreate fantastic environments wrapped in a supernatural and mysterious atmosphere.They stand out for that atmosphere of unreality, mystery, always located on a real plane that deforms and disrupts.Thus, in La Corza blanca , where the protagonist is transformed at night into the aforementioned animal; or in El monte de las animas , in which the very scene of a love walk is transformed into the field of ghostly horror and in which terror reaches the best defended and decorated bedroom; or, finally, in Green eyes and, above all, Moonbeam , where the unreal, confronted with reality, makes the protagonists opt for dreams , by the madness in which they want to live what reality denies them.The descriptions of environments are achieved: the noise of the entrance into the cathedral in Maese Pérez, the organist , the silence of the cloister in The moonlight or the ghostly processions of The Golden Anklet and El Miserere .

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