SOURCE: “The ‘Existential Wave’ in Bécquer's Rimas,” in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 13, 1986, pp. 25-31.

In the following essay, Billick contends that Bécquer, more than any of his predecessors, formulated in his poetic work Rimas a sophisticated exposition of the existential problem of being.

In What is Existentialism? William Barrett writes that although metaphysical concerns have traditionally been the domain of philosophy, in the twentieth century poetry “has raised the fundamental problem of man and his destiny in a startling form.”¹ He further observes that “from the contemporary poets who are anxious about the modern age there is a direct link back through the nineteenth century.”² In Spanish literature, any effort to uncover the roots of modern poetry inevitably leads one to the works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, universally accepted as a transitional figure between Romanticism and contemporary poetry: “To understand Bécquer is...