Jose de Espronceda

José de Espronceda y Delgado (Almendralejo, March 25, 1808-Madrid, May 23, 1842) was a Spanish writer of the Romantic era, considered the most representative poet of early Romanticism. in Spain.

Biography

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Espronceda was born in Almendralejo (Badajoz province, Extremadura) on March 25, 1808. The full name he was given when he was baptized that same day was "José Ignacio Javier Oriol Encarnación de Espronceda y Delgado". He was the son of the then sergeant major of the Borbón cavalry regiment Juan José Camilo de Espronceda y Fernández Pimentel, a fifty-nine-year-old native of Los Barrios, who was traveling with his family to Badajoz when the birth occurred; his birth in Almendralejo was, therefore, fortuitous. His paternal great-grandparents were distinguished merchants established in Tafalla (Navarra), and with an old manor house there, and his grandfather was a competent soldier who reached the rank of lieutenant and gave his son Juan José Camilo the same race; He served in the Gibraltar campaign of 1782 under the orders of the famous writer José Cadalso, who died there, and distinguished himself particularly in the War of Independence, even getting the cross and medal of the Order of San Hermenegildo and the degree colonel. He was assigned to La Coruña with his family. During the Constitutional Triennium (1820-1823) he was in Guadalajara, and then, until his death in 1833, in Madrid.

José de Espronceda's mother was María del Carmen Delgado y Lara and she had married Juan José Camilo in 1804 in Zaragoza; both were widowers and had already deceased children; she contributed a considerable dowry. Her family and she herself were based in a town in Granada, Pinos del Valle; she also had military relatives, and also ecclesiastical ones, some as distinguished as his uncle, the archbishop, cardinal and vice president of the Senate Juan José Bonel y Orbe; a branch of her family came from the Basque Country. In short, the poet was born into a wealthy middle-class family.

Espronceda's mother had been in Madrid with her son since at least 1815, when the soldier and liberal conspirator Porlier was shot in Galicia; he was followed by Lacy in 1817; the father, however, remained oblivious to all politics and met with them in 1820, when the liberal revolution of Rafael del Riego triumphed; All these facts impressed the young José, who in 1820 presented and withdrew his application to undertake a military career as a cadet at the Segovia Artillery Academy. And he began to study at the Colegio de San Mateo in Madrid, founded in 1821 by the pre-romantic poet Alberto Lista because he had been denied a professorship at the Reales Estudios de San Isidro because he had become French; It was a private, modern school (it had physics and chemistry laboratories and taught not only ancient languages, but modern ones: French, English, Italian and German) and quite expensive; the students had to buy two uniforms, in addition; the curriculum was quite a declaration of intent:

A nation governed by liberal principles needs before all things that young people acquire science and virtues; without these gifts, they will not love the constitutional regime, which replaces justice to passions and favor, nor can they be useful to the homeland and themselves; for in free governments man without instruction serves little, and man without virtues is dangerous.

Lista's students founded the so-called Academia del Mirto at the fall of the liberal regime in 1823 to continue with the teachings of the closed school. Other than Espronceda himself, Santos López Pelegrín, Cesáreo Blandin, Jaime Dot read poetry there, Antonio José Cabanilles, Lino Orellana, Gabriel Ferrer y Dávila, Juan Bautista Alonso, Ventura de la Vega, Santiago López Pelegrín, Luis María Pastor, Luis de Usoz, Felipe Pardo y Aliaga and other unidentified characters. From one of its members, Miguel Ortiz, came the idea of creating a liberal secret society formed by himself, Espronceda, Bernardino Núñez de Arenas, Ventura de la Vega, Patricio de la Escosura and up to twelve young members at least, under the name of the "Numantinos" (1823-1825). The society attended the public execution of Rafael del Riego and conspired, Escosura wrote, to avenge his death.Espronceda was only fifteen years old at the time.

Sepulture in the sacramental of St. Righteous.

Denunciated for his intellectual activities to the absolutist police by a mole introduced into society, the former printer of El Zurriago Manuel Ruiz del Cerro, in 1825 was sentenced to exile from Madrid for five years, Although his sentence was finally reduced to three months, which he will serve in a monastery in Guadalajara where his father was assigned. In the summer of 1827 he went to Portugal (where he fell in love with Teresa Mancha, daughter of the liberal émigré colonel Epifanio Mancha), and then to England, where he arrived on September 15 of that year; there he came into contact with the circle of Spanish liberal émigrés from Somers Town, more specifically that of General Torrijos, who conspired to overthrow the absolutist regime; from there he then went to Brussels as the general's emissary and finally settled in Paris as a liberal exile, from where he traveled back to London to receive orders, where he met Teresa Mancha again. At that time he read Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata , Voltaire's La Henriade and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa's Poética . At that time he composed the fragments of an epic poem, El Pelayo; but he is more attracted to the compositions that James Macpherson signs with the pseudonym Ossian, and he writes various compositions inspired by those influences and a sorrowful sonnet to the execution of Torrijos and his companions. He also composes a first dramatic attempt, Blanca de Borbón , a neoclassical tragedy that aims to expose a parable about the government of the bad king.

Portrait of Espronceda

He participated in the revolutionary waves of 1830 in Paris together with some old friends of his. Shortly after Teresa would marry by order of her father with a merchant named Guillermo del Bayo. With her he returned to Spain, along with other liberals, thanks to the amnesty declared after the death of the sovereign Fernando VII, in 1833. In 1838 Teresa left Espronceda and died shortly after.

After the king's death, Espronceda devoted himself to politics and journalism. He enlisted in the National Militia becoming the first lieutenant of the Madrid Hunters Company. In 1834 he entered the Royal Guard, but Cea Bermúdez took him away from Madrid, fearing his inclinations as an exalted liberal, and assigned him to Cuéllar, where he began to write his historical novel Sancho Saldaña or Cuéllar's Castilian . However, he continues to be active in the literary life of the capital, since that year he worked as editor of the newspaper El Siglo, which Martínez de la Rosa (also a romantic, moderate writer, who succeeded in the government of Spain from Cea Bermúdez) censored, which led to the disaffection of Larra and Espronceda, the two most prominent writers of the most liberal romanticism, and the poet's exile in September, this time to Badajoz.

In 1836 he was appointed secretary of the Spanish Legation in The Hague and shortly after he was elected deputy for Almería while Larra was for Ávila, but these elections were annulled. He was finally elected parliamentarian before the Cortes Generales in 1842 for the Progressive Party. His activity as a deputy occupied the last two months of his life. He died at the age of thirty-four due to a cold in his throat that led to garrotillo (diphtheria) in that same year, 1842, when he was about to marry Bernarda de Beruete.

Works

Poetry (1840)

During his stay at the monastery, and encouraged by his teacher, the Sevillian scholar and poet Alberto Lista, he began to write the historical poem El Pelayo in octaves reales, which he left unfinished. He later wrote the historical novel Sancho Saldaña or the Castilian of Cuéllar . In 1835 he wrote El pastor Clasiquino , a comic mockery of neoclassicism and in 1840 a volume of Poems that had great success and repercussions.

Espronceda is considered the quintessential Spanish romantic poet because of his Byronic character and because his poetry shows an exalted liberal ideology that is in tune with the initial heyday of Spanish romanticism, which dates back to the 1830s after the death of Fernando VII and the return of the liberal exiles. Indeed, his poetry presents echoes of that of Lord Byron, especially in his two longest narrative poems: The student of Salamanca, on the subject of the Don Juanesque seducer, which can be considered as a finished exponent of the romantic genre of the legend, considered the best poem in this subgenre of the XIX century, and the incomplete The Devil mundo (1841), a heterogeneous philosophical poem in which he describes man as a being of natural innocence who suffers from social reality and its evils, which includes the famous "Canto a Teresa", dedicated to his lover Teresa Mancha, one of the greatest among love elegies. He also wrote a large number of short poems that he called & # 34; Songs & # 34;, among which the best known stands out as the "Song of the pirate", which for decades Spanish schoolchildren have memorized; They also include "A Jarifa in an orgy", "The executioner", "The beggar", "The prisoner of death" or "Song of the Cossack". All these poems are inspired by anti-heroes or characters who are marginalized or excluded from society, thus for the first time the social theme appears clearly formulated in Spanish poetry. It should be noted, however, that the authorship of the poem «Desperation», for a long time attributed to Espronceda, is disputed by some researchers, who attribute it to Juan Rico and Amat.^{[citation required]}

In his «Hymn to the Sun» and in the poem «Óscar y Malvina» Espronceda also approaches the poetry of James Macpherson, inventor of the Celtic vate Ossian. The style, more cultivated here by the Extremaduran author, is somewhat fond of rhetorical effects, but it is flexible and inspired by his best moments.

For José Moreno Villa, he was seduced «by the mystery, by the primitive goodness, friend of the neglected, enemy of expired norms. It is not strange that he had more admirers than other romantics ».

In 2006, Diego Martínez Torrón produced the first annotated edition of the complete works of Espronceda, with textual fixation and unknown texts, which he expanded with other unpublished texts in El otro Esproceda.