Espronceda y Delgado, José de

Born Mar. 25, 1808, in Almendralejo, Badajoz Province; died May 23, 1842, in Madrid. Spanish writer.

A participant in the revolutionary movement, Espronceda propagandized republican ideas. He lived abroad from 1826 to 1833. He was a prominent spokesman for the revolutionary wing of Spanish romanticism. Espronceda began his literary career as a classicist, producing such works as the narrative poem Pelayo (unfinished, 1823–25). He was the author of the historical novel Sancho Saldaña, or the Castilian from Cuéllar (1834) and the romantic drama Blanca of Borbón (published 1870). His social poetry expressed the revolt of the individual against bourgeois society. Examples of such verse include the collection Poems (1840), the narrative poem The Student of Salamanca (1839), and the poems “The Beggar,” “The Executioner,” and “The Man Condemned to Death.” He exposed the Europe of petty traders in such poems as “The Decline of Europe.” In several of his elegies, notably “The Death of Torrijos and His Comrades,” Espronceda glorified the heroes who fell in the struggle for freedom.