So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the question of outside influences does not even arise.  Unamuno is probably the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their source in Baudelaire and Verlaine.  These over-sensitive and over-refined artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men.  Unamuno is too genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of this art.  Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity.  He is indeed more than modern.  When, as he often does, he strikes the true poetic note, he is outside time.  His appeal is not in complexity but in strength.  He is not refined:  he is final.

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In the Preface to his Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prologo (1921) Unamuno says:  " ... novelist—­that is, poet ... a novel—­that is, a poem.”  Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical conception of the novel.  There is of course an infinite variety of types of novels.  But they can probably all be reduced to two classes—­i.e., the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in them.  The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or objective type.  This type is more in tune with the detached and scientific character of the age.  The novel is often nowadays considered as a document, a “slice of life,” a piece of information, a literary photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents us from seeing with our own eyes.  It is obvious, given what we now know of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno.  He is a utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities.  His utilitarianism transcends our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones.  He is, moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life usually entails.  For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the dramatist.  Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this circle is travelled in opposite directions.  The poet goes inwards first, then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home.  The dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest of wisdom gathered in reality.  It is the recognition of his own lyrical inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the novel and the poem.