SOURCE: “Bécquer and the Creative Imagination,” in Hispanic Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, July, 1967, pp. 252-69.

In the following essay, Hartsook presents an overview of Bécquer's philosophy of creative imagination, focusing on both his poetry and prose.

During the last fifty years there has been a growing interest in that field of psychology which deals with the creative uses of the imagination. Recent works in this field provide us with data collected from poets, artists, musicians, and scientists revealing their own imaginative processes in artistic creativity and scientific discovery.¹ But these works lament the scarcity of material for such investigations. Literary artists have not often left records of introspective analysis of their own mental processes, and when they have the record is usually sketchy. The revelations of Coleridge, Dryden, Blake, Poe, Valéry, Housman, and Yeats are among the better known. New data are always welcome to students...