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altering the individuality of the Castilian lexicon, many gaps were filled that had stymied the manifestation of ideas which could not pass through the diction as long as the voices that uttered them were previously consecrated by the intransigent despotic academy; in a word, the language was enriched. So, Espronceda did just this and broke the laws governing poetic language, fatally, irresistibly, with the blind force of his psyche—that tough precept of poetry, as one feels in his breast this man’s robust poetic temperament, exploded in a gasp of asphyxia, thirsty for light and space. Ros de Olano said that “while our poet was aspiring to condense humanity into a book, the first thing he did was break all the established precepts, except for the logical unity.”6
Suffice a reading of El diablo mundo to recognize the metrical variety, the marvelous sensationalist rhythmic play, no less impressive than the well-understood freedom with which he has handled the rhyme in such an intensely profound musical way. But again, we repeat, he did not create this poetic voluntarily, reflectively, and, if he did, it would not have resulted in poetry of emotion, feeling, and enthusiastic rhythmical vitality: Espronceda is not the Parnassian who sacrifices the tones of life to the ingenuous games of color and harmony, which is what Hugo’s successors resorted to in the end; nor is he the Greek or Hellenistic pasticheur of cold pulchritude and symmetry from some previous pseudoclassic of his in a Spanish Parnassus. His poetry is none of this, but rather the frank, uncovered, tumultuously melodious canto whipped out, the image of emotion, the intense palpitation of great beautiful thoughts, like a burning touch of sunlight inside the transparent crystal of the word, which trembles and glimmers; a canto that is heard reverberating in the innermost core of the heart, like the orchestra of universal life in which every note of the human heart’s scale rings from silent tears all the way to the garrulous laughter of joy. For such a sublime lyric the music could not have been otherwise.
The stanzas deemed of lesser art—being frivolous, light, and childish—offered themselves to him and, for reasons of fidelity, he accepted and used them to orchestrate ideas that were ordinary because of their lack of importance or to play with errant breezes in which he would exteriorize the vanities of the world. With variable euphony, due to the proper nature of their prosodic organisms, these forms of meter had no need for improvement beneath the chisel of Espronceda, after all that had been achieved by the instructive poets of the eighteenth century. The image of beings, who wander the world in pursuit of frivolous pleasures, without experiencing the disconcerting lofty idea of the reason of things, we see in this short stanza:
Allá va la nave,
bogad sin temor,
ya el aura la arrulle,
ya silve Aquilón.
Yet that severe, olympic, inflexible, and majestic hendecasyllable of the Argensolas took on an infinite variety of attitudes and intensities, along with a determined number of tonic accents in a slow duration or swift parade, as when he says,
Los siglos a los siglos se atropellan,
los hombres a los hombres se suceden …
In explosions such lines let out a piercing scream of anguish, pain, or anger, which nails a profound sustained accent into the word that has been expressed, even though the total cadence of the verse gets dislocated and its prosodic sound gets altered. The hendecasyllable is the verse par excellence, preferred not only by Espronceda but by all Spanish romantic poets. It seems that the Alexandrine of Berceo and the dodecasyllable of Juan de Mena, which are also meters favored by the Castilian muse, were not to Espronceda’s liking or in accordance with his poetic sense of organization, since he hardly worked in these.
The laws of poetry, no doubt, like the laws of language in general, are based on the psychophysiological laws of man. Each people has its poetry, just as each individual has his own voice, a special timber in his words: each form of meter and rhythm could be considered the special timber of the poetry of a people, just as rhyme is the note of distinction of phrasing in music. For that reason, just as French romanticism’s favorite expression was the eighteenth-century Alexandrine modified by Hugo, the Spanish romantic period crystalized its exteriorization in the romance and the hendecasyllable, by making these malleable and adorning them with rich, opulent rhyme. This is why we can say that it’s logical and rational, without fear of being mistaken, that a single metrical form corresponding to a determined sociability is susceptible to transformation and even abandon over the course of time and with the evolution of said sociability. And this is the legitimacy of the revolution that Espronceda put in effect, since he was the voice of his people and the moment.
From our perspective, José de Espronceda is the head of romanticism in Castilian poetry, not because he is the leader of an intellectual or physical movement who for the first time raises the revolutionary flag and unleashes the nacent vision of a new activity but rather because he is the one who, though serving after other predecessors in the already-formed ranks, grabs ahold of the standard of the rebellion and, raising himself up with it to a height he had not reached before, waves it next to the sun, like a victorious eagle, and leaves it nailed on high while he flies off to Glory.
* * *
Behind Espronceda, who completed his mission in the progress of humanity by the age of thirty-three, the eminent José Zorrilla appears, in whose literary figure, according to the critics, romanticism displays its most outstanding mark. Yet here we are wont to resolve a question of great importance for the principles of the school in question and its history. The author of Don Juan Tenorio does not represent the apogee of romanticism for well-founded reasons.
Far above the legends into which Zorrilla has injected the genuinely Spanish note, whose poetry is driven by the rancid perfume of the traditions of the race tacked together beneath the burning meridianal sun, far above the legends is the polyphonic canto of El diablo mundo, that grandiose poem, engendered by humanity’s innermost core, which rises out of the century that came before it and thus spontaneously surpasses Goethe’s Faust in its motivation and Christian sentiment. If these legends indeed draw from their source of inspiration, insofar as this is the history of the Spanish people—with all its war-riddled episodes and fanaticism, with all its effervescence and fragile ideals—in a word, if these poems “are written in the dust and ruins of the ancient monuments and castles” and are the voice of their race, then they might respond to one of the characters of romantic poetry, but their intrinsic importance does not fulfill the ideal of romanticism in relation to society and human evolution. “Zorrilla is not outstanding for his familiarity with the modern philosophical systems that form the superior feature in the stories of Goethe,” Camacho Roldán explains. “Before all else he is a poet, a poet of nature, a poet of the music of language, a poet whose amenable expression imitates the roaring thrust of the harsh wind.”7 Zorrilla, a contemporary of Espronceda, had a longer life to bring his artistic ideals to reality, and so he did.
In the literary oeuvre of Zorrilla there are two perfectly distinct genres: drama and legend. Corresponding to the first are the so very popular Don Juan Tenorio and El puñal del godo, among other dramas; and to the second, Más vale llegar a tiempo que rondar un año and Ganar perdiendo among his comedies. The grand tribunal of posterity has already handed down its ruling on these works, and the critics have said so much about them that there is no need for us here to engage them again, except insofar as these poems respond in one way or another to the school we are studying.
From our perspective, Don Juan Tenorio is clearly the most popular drama of all theatrical works to have been written in Castilian, and this deep sincere prestige that it enjoys among its readers can be explained by two main reasons: the water sources of inspiration Zorrilla drank from to elaborate the broad thought of this work and the form he used to embody his ideas. Don Juan Tenorio is not a figure created by Zorrilla, dispensing with a vision of society, as an a priori consequence of his astonishing fantasy, which, along with much else, was well within Zorrilla’s capabilities. Rather, Don Juan is a character who corresponds to the tradition of the Spanish people and to the spirit of its sociability. Moreover, the protagonist of this drama is a genuine model of human idiosyncrasy. To be precise, he is the passionately erotic, unreligious, and courageous personification of romantic man, and as the image of these ideas and feelings of