Between Between Reality and the Ivory Tower: the Poetry of José de Siles

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century in Spain, the writing of naturalist and modernist authors went beyond Romantic forms and became a reflection of the crisis of bourgeois ideology. An example of this is the literature of the Bohemian José de Siles (1856-1911), a poet on the fringes of the literary canon. The following essay analyses two aesthetic directions in the poetic work of José de Siles, the “writing on the street”, attentive to the miseries of the lower classes, and the “writing from the tower”, which is based on reverie and the refuge of art, with the aim of giving them a historical meaning. Thus, the poetry of José de Siles, as a poet outside the canon, is rescued in order to help compose a historical-literary system and allow a better understanding of the figure of the fin-de-siècle writer in conflict with bourgeois society.