Biography of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer | Spanish poet.

(Gustavo Adolfo Domínguez Bastida; Sevilla, 1836 - 1870, Madrid) Spanish poet. Along with Rosalía de Castro, is the head of the post-romantic poetry, trend which had distinctive features intimate issues and apparent simplicity expressive, far from the rhetorical vehemence of romanticism. Bécquer's work exerted a strong influence on later figures such as Dario Rubén, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and the poets of the generation of 27, and criticism is judged by the initiator of the contemporary Spanish poetry. But more than a big name of literary history, Bécquer is above all a poet alive, popular in every sense of the word, whose verses, moved voice and winged beauty, have enjoyed and continue enjoying the favorite of millions of readers.

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

Son and brother of painters, 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 literary career. But success smiled not him; its ambitious project of writing a history of the temples in Spain was a failure, and only managed to publish a book, years later. To live had to devote himself to journalism and make adaptations of foreign plays, mainly from the French, in collaboration with his friend Luis García Luna, both adopting the pseudonym of «Adolfo García».

During a stay in Seville in 1858, it was nine months in bed because of illness; probably it was TB, although some biographers are decanted by syphilis. During convalescence, was cared for by his brother Valeriano, which published its first legend, the leader of the red hands, and met Julia Espín, according to some critics the Muse for some of his rhymes, although for a long time erroneously believed it was Elisa Guillén, with whom the poet would have intercourse until she left him in 1860 , and that would have inspired the most bitter compositions of the poet.

In 1861, he married Casta Esteban, daughter of a physician, with whom he had three children. The marriage was never happy, and the poet took refuge in their work or in the company of his brother Valeriano, in the escapades of this to Toledo to paint.

The more fruitful phase of his career was from 1861 to 1865, years in which he composed the greater part of its legends, he wrote newspaper reports and wrote literary a woman charts, where it exposes his theories on poetry and love. A season that spent in the monastery of Veruela in 1864 it inspired him letters from my cell, a set of beautiful landscape descriptions.

Economically things improved for the poet from 1866, year in which obtained the use of the official censor of novels, which allowed him to leave his newspaper reports and focus on its legends and its rhymes, published in part in the universal Museum. But with the revolution of 1868, the poet lost his job, and his wife left him in the same year.

He then moved to Toledo with his brother Valeriano, and there eventually reconstruct the manuscript of rhymes, whose first original had disappeared when his house was sacked during the revolution days. Back in Madrid, he was appointed editor of the magazine the illustration of Madrid, which also served his brother as a draftsman.

The death, in September 1870, extremely depressed to the poet, who, foreseeing his own death, handed his friend Narciso Campillo their original so take responsibility for them after his death, which would take place three months after the Valerian.

The work of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Bécquer immense literary fame is based on his Rhymes, which initiated the current romantic intimate poetry inspired by Heine and opposed to rhetoric and bombast of the previous romantic poets. The literary criticism of the moment, however, not hosted well his poems, although his fame would not grow in the following years.

Rhymes, as they have come down to us, a total of eighty-six compositions. Of these, seventy-six were published for the first time in 1871 in charge of friends of the poet, who introduced some corrections in the text, removed some poems and altered the order of the original manuscript (the so-called book of sparrows, today kept in the National Library of Madrid).

The contents of the rhyme has been divided into four groups: the first (rhymes I to XI) is a reflection on poetry and literary creation; the second (12th to 29TH), is love and its effects on the soul of the poet; the third (XXX Li) passes to the deception and disappointment caused by love in the soul of the poet; and the fourth (LII to LXXXVI) shows the poet confronted death, disappointed love and the world. The rhymes are usually preceded by the "symphonic introduction" which, probably, Bécquer prepared as a prologue to all his work.

His prose stands out, as well as his poetry, for the great musicality and simplicity of expression, full of sensitivity; following the footsteps of Poe and Hoffmann, its legends recreate wrapped in a supernatural and mysterious atmosphere and fantastic environments. They stand out for the atmosphere of unreality, of mystery, always located on a real plane that deforms and disrupts. Thus, in La Corza blanca, where the protagonist is transformed at night into cited animal; or in monte de las ánimas, which transforms the same scenario of a loving walk in the field of ghastly horror and terror coming to the best bedroom defended and adorned; or, finally, green eyes and, above all, Ray Moon, where the unreal, faced reality, makes the players opt to sleep, by the madness which want to live that reality denied. Are accomplished descriptions of environments: the noise of the entrance into the Cathedral in Maese Pérez, the organist, the silence of the cloister in the ray of the Moon or the ghostly processions of the Bangle of gold and The Miserere.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas