Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Bécquer's Rimas, published posthumously in 1871, helped reshape Spanish lyric poetry with short, intimate poems about love, memory, and loss. His influence reaches later Spanish-language poets, including Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Not in the way he became famous afterward. He died in Madrid in 1870 at age 34, and friends helped publish his Rimas y Leyendas after his death.

The Leyendas are prose tales that mix Romantic atmosphere, folklore, religion, and the supernatural. Stories such as El monte de las ánimas show a darker narrative side than the compact lyric voice of the Rimas.

Bécquer was born in Seville in 1836, then later lived and worked in Madrid. His brother Valeriano Bécquer was a painter, and the two brothers remain closely linked in Spanish cultural history.