Artists Unknown, (A Mystery to Man), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“Mientras la humanidad siempre avanzando,

No sepa a do camina:

Mientras haya un misterio para el hombre,

!Habrá poesia!”

“While humanity is always advancing,

Do not know where you are going;

As long as there is a mystery to man, 

There will be poetry!”

—Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas, 1871

Born in Selvill in 1836, the Spanish lyric poet Gustavo Adolfo Dominguez Bécquer is noted for his “Rimes, a collection of short lyric poems. This work had such a profound influence that it is considered the starting point of Spanish contemporary poetry.

Unlike the inflated style of his contemporaries, Bécquer’s diction was spare and simple, his verses delicate and light. Yet he achieved in each poem a maximum resonance by attending to the phonetic structure of words and by using images which affected the reader’s sensibility and demanded his active collaboration. Bécquer’s ability to make words express much more than their conventional meanings anticipated the techniques of modern symbolic poetry.

Bécquer wrote most of his prose works from 1860 to 1865. These include 22 legends, which are based upon regional folklore and exploit the supernatural. While at the monastery of Veruela in 1864, he wrote a collection of nine letters entitled “Desde Mi Celda, Cartas Literarias (From My Cell, Literary Letters)”. That same year Becquer directed an important journal and was appointed official censor of novels.

In 1868 Bécquer separated from his wife and, in the wake of the revolution that ended the rule of Isabella II, went to Paris. He returned to Madrid in 1869, rewrote from memory the lost manuscript of “Rimas”, and resumed newspaper writing. The sudden death of his brother Valeriano in September of 1870 severely depressed Bécquer, and he died only 3 months later, on December 22nd, exhausted by tuberculosis. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s collected works were published posthumously in 1871.