ESPRONCEDA, Jose de, Spanish noet : b. Almendraleio, (Badaioz) 1810: d. Madi-id. 23 May 1842. His father was a colonel of cavalry, and the boy was born in the army for his mother insisted on following her husband dur ing his campaigns. At the dose of the war young Esnronceda was put into school in Mad rid; and there he soon distinguished himself by his precocity. his love of poetry, his enthusiam and his good literary taste. At the age of 14 he was already known as a poet of great promise. He was filled with democratic and revolutionary ideas ; and he was arrested for his boldly advocated ideas in his 15th year. and confined in a convent in Guadalajara, where his parents were then living. There he began the composition of his celebrated poem 'El Pelayo.' On his liberation from prison he went to Madrid; but feeling that his every movement was watched by agents of the government, he went to Gibraltar, and from there to Lisbon, London and Paris. Later he fought in the revolutionary ranks in Paris (1830). He then joined an expedition sent to help Poland. After long wandering and exile from home, often with the most limited means of subsistence, he finally took advantage of the act of amnesty of 1833 and returned to Spain. There he might have lived in peace and followed his poetical inclinations, hut his revolutionary bent kept him in constant trouble. Through family influence he obtained a commission in the Queen's Guards (1833) ; but he was soon dismissed from the army and again forced into exile, on account of his interference in politics. The following year he was permitted to return to Madrid, where he again plunged into militant politics, and into the insurrectionary movements of 1835-36. From this on he became the most ardent of the Spanish advocates of republican ism; and in 1840 his was the most listened to voice in revolutionary Spain. In December 1841 he was sent as secretary of legation to The Hague by the Republicans who had secured possession of the government, a position he retained a very short time because of his elec tion as deputy for Almeria. Already ill from his residence in the damp and cold climate of Holland, he hastened back to Madrid only to die of a severe inflammation of the throat.
Espronceda is the greatest of the passionate, patriotic poets of Spain. With him patriotism was a passion and hatred of autocracy an ob session which mastered him. There is no more
passionate and compelling voice in all Spanish literature than his. He runs all the gamut of feeling; love of the most passionate kind; the fiercest hatred of oppression and injustice; the deepest patriotism, expressed in the most com pelling words; the wildest visionary delight in socialism; the passion of great aspirations and pure and noble purpose; and the depths of despair of atheism and of vanished hopes and disappointed aspirations. On account of his vivacity, his burning imagery, his wonderful power of word painting, his simple direct meth ods in literature and his ever youthful mind, Espronceda has been called in Spain ((the poet of youth and of democracy.° No other writer in Spanish literature or Spanish life had, at his age, at his death (32), such a hold over his followers and admirers as Jose Espronceda. His companion and fellow poet, Enrique Gil, who paid his last poetic tribute to him at the graveside, broke down and sobbed like a child; and many an eye was wet among the mourners for the bright particular light of democracy that had just been extinguished in Spain. No definitive edition of Espronceda's works has been published for the reason that his efforts were spread over such a wide field of endeavor, and his writings appeared in newspapers, jour nals, reviews and pamphlets. Yet numerous editions of the best known of his literary pro ductions have been issued in Spain and in several foreign countries. In these editions the follow ing works appear: 'El Palayo' ; Won Sancho (1834) ; (El Estudiante de Sala manca' ; the drama (Ni el Tio ni el Sobrino.' written in collaboration with Antonio Ros de Olano (1834) ; many short poems of a social, political, reflective or amatory nature; (El Diablo Mundo' (1841) ; and many of the best lyrics in the Spanish language. His literary work has the form of Hugo and the spirit of Byron with an originality that is Espronceda's alone. The first edition of his collected writ ings appeared in Paris in 1840, the second in Madrid in 1846; and the Hartzenbusch edition, with a biography by Ferrer del Rio, in Paris two years later. A more complete edition than any of these was published by Espronceda's only daughter, Blanche Espronceda de Escosura in 1874. A fairly complete edition of his poetical works also appeared in Barcelona in 1883. See