these lines by Espronceda:
¡Dicha es soñar, y el riguroso seño
no ver jamás de la verdad impía!
His principle poem, El diablo mundo, is the battle of vanity and ephemerality in the world against the eternal ideal of immortality, the childish reality of life—“a la que tanto nuestro afán se adhiere”—against the eternal destinies, which may have created the spirit of man by dint of his intellectualizing the instinctive feeling of perpetuity. Thus, this is the battle of the spirit of the century and of Spain: the poet did not try to paint the objective aspect of his work deliberately, with the preconceived notion that his lyre was to be the diapason on which he would shudder a sublime tumultuous breath of human life, in order to catch, in some formidable clash, the echo that would return to the shores of history as the complaint of a century fleetingly passing through the mute bosom of Nature.
Espronceda did not think of this, just as the Cripple of Lepanto did not think that the core of Don Quixote was going to reflect two opposite modes of perceiving life for all of eternity. His psyche was the poem, and the poetry of Espronceda, let us add, existed from the moment that the poet began to live.
In El diablo mundo, on one hand the world throbs with its objects that reach their end, that are born and die like fatuous fires, and on the other hand there is a distant, magical, diffuse, and mysterious chimera that comes from beyond the grave. Might this otherworldly vision be grounded in reality? And if it is, could this be the paradise that the Nazarene spoke of at Golgotha?
This epopoeia that lived in the soul of Espronceda is his own. It is his idiosyncrasy, his artistic personality, his philosophical brilliance, and this is what legitimizes it and why the particular concrete physiognomy of one sole man characterizes the metaphysical concern of an epoch of humanity—a consistent concern for knowing where to locate the eternal, absolute core of all revolutions of thought, expressions of society, and evolutionary progress of Nature. This romantic in heart and soul, obsessed with the not-too-distant memory and devastating analysis of the previous century and with contemplating the uncertainty and revolt swaying the society of his time, in the absence of a strong, firm metaphysics, José de Espronceda wondered, if everything (including the work of reason and human freedom) is torn to shreds and pulverized, dies and is replaced by another formula, then where is invariable eternal certainty? And this thought of the poet is made tangible in the energetic painting of the “man overwhelmed by his age, embittered by painful useless experience, who hopelessly closes a book he was reading sadly convinced of the sterility of science.”5
Espronceda’s other poems respond to the same spirit of El diablo mundo, although to varying degrees. For a new thought, a new eternal universal question, he was to demand a new elocution, a new mode of expression. The artistic manifestation of the social spirit that speaks in these terms to all men, who in turn grow enthused by it and love it, as a father loves his babe in whom the soul of the life giver is sweetly transformed, is the ideal of art—and this is what Espronceda achieved.
Under the law of evolution, the Castilian language transformed by the power of the romantic poets’ innovative spirit, like the French language, evolved in its richness and flexibility at the price of breaking off with the dictatorial, inclement, and erroneous grammar of its neoclassical past. Without 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.
