Like many artistic geniuses, especially those who die so young, Bécquer remained in relative obscurity throughout his short life and though his collection of short stories, Leyendas, was published during his lifetime between 1857-64, the collection of poems in Rimas was published posthumously in 1871. It is these two works, however, which steadily gained critical recognition and raised the artist to his present status.

In his own life, he was oppressed by poverty and recurrent bouts of ill-health (he was constantly wracked by tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed him), so part of him took refuge from this unpleasant reality in the legends and folk-stories of romantic Spain. His imagination was vivid, and frequently took on a sense of the morbid through his intense feelings for the past. His dominant themes are idealism, love, spirituality, and the supernatural, yet he handles them in a distinctly understated style, which marks him out from the altogether more florid and opulent use of emotion by his contemporary Spanish romantics.

The supernatural and the fantastic had an intense fascination for Bécquer, but without the pretentiousness or pose in his reversion to things medieval.

The compilation of poems in Rimas contains seventy-six verses about a poet’s struggle for perfection and eventual failure in both love and art. The language, written in a colloquial style, varies between rhymed meter and speech-rhythms. The poems are organized into four categories, each section concentrating on poetry as an art, a love affair, antagonism through suffering, and hopelessness. As the anthology progresses, the tone also shifts from frustration and despair to detachment and solace in death. In this, the verses reveal his own experience with true heartbreak, his strong religious beliefs, his own endeavour for perfection as a poet, and his frustration and final acceptance of suffering and death. Not exactly cheerful stuff, but dark and brooding.

The artistic instinct – what actually drove Bécquer – is perhaps best described in his own words (which also illustrate the effective simplicity of his narrative): “My Muse, like those parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear, is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life will be sufficient to give form. And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable, stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those myriad germs which seethe and quiver within the secret places of the earth without strength enough to reach the surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers and fruits. They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is left by a midnight dream, which the morning cannot recall” (this translation, to my mind preserves the rich descriptiveness of Bécquer’s writing and is taken from a review which appeared in The New York Times on 18 September 1909).

A closer look at the collection of short stories in Leyendas also gives further keys to Bécquer’s preoccupations and fascinations. The story about Master Pérez the Organist, which is based on a legend from Seville, for example, sets the tone for the whole collection of stories. It is a quite simple, almost child-like tale of an old, blind organist who returns from the “other world” on Christmas Eve to play again on his beloved instrument. The tale engagingly describes the talkative and superstitious villagers, gathered in the convent chapel, to marvel at the miracle. In the three stories Emerald Eyes, The White Doe and The Gnome, Bécquer describes the persistent survival of peasant beliefs in fairies, enchantment, and magic. The Kiss is a peculiarly powerful story, casting a strange spell over the reader’s imagination, while The Ray of Moonlight pursues themes that wouldn’t be entirely foreign or outmoded to today’s readership. The anthology includes stories that are genuinely macabre in spirit – such as the creepy Spirits’ Mountain and The Devil’s Cross – with only The Set of Emeralds displaying any gleam of real humour.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was born on 17^th February 1836, in Seville, where he lived with his father, Don José Domínguez Bécquer, a prominent painter, until the age of ten when his father died. He then lived with a series of relatives before coming to reside with his wealthy godmother. Although she financed his education and a four-year apprenticeship with the painter Antonio Cabral Bejarano, the godmother really wanted him to begin a career in commerce. Instead, Bécquer moved to Madrid in 1854 to pursue his literary dreams, thus forfeiting his inheritance in her will. From 1864 to 1868, he served as the official censor of novels under the reign of Queen Isabel. In his spare time, Bécquer frequently contributed anonymous poems and articles to the newspapers El contemporáneo and El museo Universal. He also joined a small ring of writers, artists, and musicians directed by Joaquin Espin y Guillen, a professor at the Conservatoire in Seville. In 1868 he began collecting his poems for Rimas; unfortunately, most had been previously purchased by the minister Gonzalez Bravo. The plundering of Bravo´s house during the Spanish Revolution resulted in the loss of these manuscripts, forcing Bécquer to reconstruct them from memory over the course of several years. Following his brother’s death in September 1870, Bécquer became extremely ill and died on December 22, 1870. On December 23, a group of his friends published a two volume collection of his works to aid his widow and surviving three sons.