SOURCE: “‘Poesía … Eres tú,’ or the Construction of Bécquer and the Sign of the Woman,” in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 53-73.

In the following essay, Mandrell explains Bécquer's use of women as a theme in his Rimas.

The dictum ‘Poesía … eres tú’ [Poetry … is you] (59; 549)—found both in the last line of the twenty-first rima (LG 21) and in the first of the Cartas literarias a una mujer—sums up what has long been considered one of the more pressing questions with respect to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and his poetry and prose.¹ This question is nothing less than the nature of woman, as well as the identity of the woman, in Bécquer's work, and it has had serious implications for the study of Bécquer. With few exceptions, discussions of the poetry included in the volume known as...