Spanish · 1836–1870
Bécquer was orphaned at ten in Seville, went to Madrid at eighteen to be a poet, and spent fifteen years failing at it — writing newspaper filler, adapting French plays under a pseudonym, taking a censorship post from a minister he then lost, and coughing. He married badly and separated. The manuscript of his poems was destroyed in the revolution of 1868 and he rewrote them from memory in a book he called The Book of Sparrows. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-four, and his friends published the Rimas and Leyendas the following year as a subscription to support his children. They became the most widely memorised poems in the Spanish language. Every Spanish-speaking student can produce the line about the dark swallows returning, and Machado, Jiménez, Cernuda and Lorca all took his short, unadorned lyric as their starting point.