The Duke of Rivas, who as a lyricist is a mediocre imitator of Quintana and Gallego, opens the way, with the audacity of an innovator, to the series of romantic dramas: some grandiose, such as El Trovador by Antonio García Gutierrez and Los amantes de Teruel(1836) by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch. The old traditional themes are renewed little by little on an elementary sentimentality of impulses and emotions, and with an archaic conventionalism, which only singing lyricism, varying them on reasons of pain and hope, could make accepted as an eternal reality of dreams.. José Zorrilla y Moral, with El zapatero y el Rey (1841) and Don Juan Tenorio(1844), spread in the theater his sensibility as an improviser poet who creates with his lyrical fantasy a dreamy atmosphere, within which all ethical enthusiasm becomes impoverished and vanishes. Zorrilla is the poet of delightful dreams, of undecided restlessness, of sentimental naivety. His song is based on singing connections and on resonances that transcend its concrete content. The language that romanticism has subtracted from classical conciseness and precision, sometimes sounds empty in him. The sensitive and picturesque element is played out in excess; the intellectual element has almost vanished; the images tumultuously imprecise and translate thrills, impulses and sentimental hesitations. This transformation process had been prepared by the major lyricist of the so-called subjective romanticism, José Espronceda y Delgado (1808-42). Following the example of the French Muse, he was the poet of lost loves, either disenchanted or tired, and of nostalgic desires, with that humanitarianism that seeks painful souls (A Jarifa), or those who live on the margins of society (El Pirata), or the abandoned (Al mendigo). In Espronceda pain is the only reality, pleasure is the eternal illusion and death is rest. His larger compositions (El estudiante de Salamanca and El Diablo mundo) lack organicity and are resolved in separate lyrics, in nostalgia for memories, in elegies of love, in effusions of melancholy. The lyric Zorrilla of the Cantos del Trovador, the Recuerdos y Fantasías, the Leyenda del Cid, it is more objective, but less profound. Its shape is more picturesque, but it rests on the exuberant richness of verbal expression. His sentimental motifs, which unfold on agile rhythms, ensured his compositions the popularity they still enjoy. The Romantic movement renewed with Bohl de Faber the study of the classical national theater and of the Romancero, whose first collection (1828) is that of Augustín Durán; poetically reconstructed, in a mixture of archeology and history enlivened by enthusiasm, the sentimental aspects of the homeland with Recuerdos y Bellezas de España(1839) by Pablo Piferrer and (1848) José María Quadrado; he discovered the colorful face of medieval Spain in his regional literatures with Milá y Fontanals and José Amador de los Ríos; he illuminated the document as the basis of any critical reconstruction with Bofarull y Mascaró; he favored the synthesis and particular systematic views with Alcalá Galiano and with Modesto Lafuente. But on the whole it must be observed that the Spanish historical tradition, fully invested by the interpretations of early German romanticism and by the rapid generalizations of later European romanticism, was profoundly distorted and transformed, with the consequent vision of a passionate, sentimental and dreamy Spain. from irrational faith, from solitary contemplative mysticism and from abstract chivalric honor. Concrete moral realism, which from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century constitutes the essence of his literature and his art, passed into suborder. The critique of positivist historicism or subjective enthusiasm continued to romanticize writers such as Cervantes, Lope, Tirso and Calderón; who attended to human reality and felt it historically conditioned and wanted their art to be the concrete expression of the national spirit and not the art of dreams. However, through the work of Romanticism, the schemes of Alberto Lista’s neoclassical criticism or José Gómez Hermosilla’s rigid classicism were subverted, and a more lively, more spontaneous and more fruitful feeling than poetry and art took over. With the sincerity of a restless soul and an intelligence open to all forms of thought, Mariano José de Larra (more spontaneous and more fruitful than poetry and art. With the sincerity of a restless soul and an intelligence open to all forms of thought, Mariano José de Larra (more spontaneous and more fruitful than poetry and art. With the sincerity of a restless soul and an intelligence open to all forms of thought, Mariano José de Larra (Fígaro) brought journalistic criticism to fields where political and literary interests, spirits of renewal and lively satire of costume converged. After him, in another sphere, apart from materialistic sensualism and romantic individualism, José María Quadrado carried out his original journalistic activity; which coincides with the renewal of liberalism in the traditionalist Catholic sense, under the influence of De Maistre, Lamennais and De Bonald. It was an adaptation into the Spanish cultural tradition and, without denying the products of civilization and history, we had El Criterion (1845) and the Filosofía elemental (1846) by Jaime Balmes and, in the form of an oratory polemic that is sometimes fierce and acrid, the Ensayo sobre el catolicismo(1851) by Juan Donoso Cortés.
