SOURCE: “Romanticism, Imagination, and Bécquer,” and “The Ways of the Imagination,” in The Romantic Imagination in the Works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1993, pp. 9-22, 71–122.

In the following excerpts, Bynum presents an overview of Bécquer's writing in the context of the philosophical and aesthetic orientation of European Romanticism and then explains Bécquer's view of the imagination's significance.

There are words of a superficially romantic character in which the imagination is used simply to provide a holiday from reality. But the true romantic fancy constitutes a valid mode of perception, perhaps even of thought.

Alan Menhennet, The Romantic Movement

The complete literary production of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer is the brilliant result of a coherently elaborated world view that closely parallels that of other major European romantic authors. It is a philosophical and aesthetic orientation marked by a...