| I propose to study the internal dialectics of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer's Rimas (1868), analyzing the structural and philosophical elements of his work.; In this study, I closely examine the Rimas in the light of the fundamental metaphors which lead to organizational unity in Becquer's work. That is, my interest centers upon explaining the internal logic of Becquer's poetry and prose by means of the fundamental concepts: light, space and time. I take as my point of departure, the dialectics of "yes/but no" ("s(')i/pero no") which Antonio Machado refers to in his brief commentary on Becquer.; I begin from the premise that Becquer's work must be considered as a whole, from which no single component may be altered or displaced. In this sense, Becquer's prose as well as his poetry, seem to exist in relation to the total effect, while at the same time the whole depends upon its various parts for survival. My first chapter, which serves as an introduction and synthesis, attempts to find the structural unity of Becquer's theory and poetic praxis through the topics of love, feeling and poetry. I take as my point of departure, the famous prologue to Ferran's Soledad, as well as other texts in prose and poetry (some of which have already been analyzed by Ben(')itez and D(')iaz), relating these works to other similar poetic theories (particularly Poe and Baudelaire).; After Chapter I, I go on to study the problem of light and its relation to time and space. Light is a metaphor which, in my opinion, explains the internal coherence of Becquer's work. If in Chapter II it affects the objects and transforms the feelings and the imagination of the poet, then in Chapter III it uncovers the game of illusions and deceptions which characterizes the organic rhythm of the poet's work. Becquer always sees the double source of reality (illusion/deception) behind the fundamental metaphoric interplay of the star and the lamp. One of the mainstreams of this game is the problem of perspective and ironic distance which come from the German romantics (Schlegel, Tieck, Solger). Through the metaphor of light, he proposes also that there exists a duality between the world of imaginative observation and the false world of analysis and scientific explanation. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI... |
