SOURCE: Silver, Philip W. “Luis Cernuda and the Restitution of Romanticism.” In Ruin and Restitution: Reinterpreting Romanticism in Spain, pp. 99-122. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Silver addresses Cernuda's place in the “poetics of failure” characteristic of Spanish Romanticism.

The possibility that romanticism itself is a “pseudohistorical totalization,”¹ intended to stem the infrangible erosion of material history, has been amply illustrated in chapter 2. But in Spain the precariousness of this literary event is especially striking. There the early nineteenth-century “bourgeois” revolution and its effort at state-making was a partial failure, whereas a conservative nationalistic romanticism enjoyed a relative success. “Spanish romanticism” evolved with such a conservative inflection that even pseudo-high romantic authors like Espronceda and Larra did not escape assimilation.² Thus, Spanish historical Romanticism is best approached as the analogue of a contemporary moderado liberal social and political compromise.

Given the bald politicization in Spain...