Romanticism in Spanish Literature: A Deep Dive
Romanticism in Spanish Literature
Key Characteristics
1. Subjectivism:
Serving as a mode of expression, the exalted soul of the Romantic poet expresses desires of love, social justice, individual happiness, and a longing for the past. Romanticism cultivates a true cult of the individual, with love as a subjective phenomenon.
2. Rebellion and Escape:
The clash between a rejected everyday reality and the desire for individual freedom produces a state of disillusionment and failure. This leads to suicide or evasion through fantasy, medievalism, and the supernatural.
3. Nationalism:
Individualism celebrates the unique aspects of each country, giving rise to an appreciation for traditions, legends, and landscapes.
4. Nature’s Influence:
The landscape reflects the writer’s mood, becoming a symbol of melancholy, sadness, abandonment, loneliness, and death. Romantic writers prefer evocative environments: night, cemeteries, stormy seas, lonely gardens, barren landscapes, and ruins.
5. Emphatic Language:
Exaggerated and filled with question and exclamation marks, ellipses, strong adjectives, violent antitheses, metaphors, and various literary figures. A Romantic vocabulary emerges, with words like: dreamy, melancholy, gloom, doom, and hell.
6. Breaking with Tradition:
In opposition to literary norms, Romantic writers mix styles like prose and verse, neglecting traditional metrics.
Romantic Poetry
Melancholy and boredom replace excitement and protest. Love poets sing of privacy or find inspiration in the past, medieval legends, or exotic places. The landscapes and style are typical of Romantic literature. Classical strophic schemes are eliminated, and free verse is used so the poem adjusts to the different stages of emotion. Romance is also recovered.
Significant Poets
José de Espronceda:
Known for works like The Student of Salamanca, The Pirate Song, and The Beggar. The Pirate Song (1835) is his most famous poem, notable for its direct address to the reader, breaking with convention. Its simple vocabulary ensured its accessibility and popularity. The archetypal pirate figure embodies the Romantic assertion of individual rights against social norms.
Literary Figures:
- Syneresis: Pronouncing two vowels within a word as one.
- Concatenation: Linking the last word of one verse to the beginning of the next.
- Anadiplosis/Epadiplosis: Beginning and ending a sentence or verse with the same word.
- Antithesis: Contradiction of ideas.
- Anaphora: Repeating words at the beginning of phrases or verses.
- Epiphora: Repeating elements at the end of lines.
- Parallelism: Repeating similar syntactic structures.
- Hyperbole: Exaggeration.
- Metaphor: Replacing a term with an imaginary one.
- Simile: Comparing two objects or realities.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:
A master of intimate lyricism, defined by simplicity and naturalness. He prefers assonance and diverse metrics (royal octave, free verse, limerick, serventesio). He uses numerous stylistic resources and also wrote legends filled with mystery and medieval themes.
Analysis of “Rogue Wave, You Break…”
Themes: Sadness, death, stormy and dreary landscapes.
Metrics: Two quartets (lira) with an A(11 syllables) B(11) C(11) D(7) pattern, repeated in the second stanza. Assonant rhyme in pairs.
Literary Figures:
- Metaphor: “Wrapped in white sheets” refers to foaming waves.
- Personification: “Blind swirl,” “waves roar.”
- Hyperbole: “Giant waves.”
- Alliteration: Repetition of the /s/ sound.
- Parallelism: The fourth verse of both stanzas acts as a chorus.