THE RHYMES OF GUSTAVO ADOLFO BÉCQUER AND 19TH-CENTURY MEXICAN LITERATURE.

Abstract

This article examines the reception and influence of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Rimas in nineteenth-century Mexican literature, emphasizing their wide circulation in both educated and popular contexts. The author shows how the musicality, expressive simplicity, and use of assonant rhyme facilitated memorization and oral transmission, allowing Bécquer’s poems to be appropriated by diverse social groups, even in largely illiterate populations. The study analyzes the explicit presence of the Rimas in Mexican narrative, particularly in Rafael Delgado’s La calandria, where the famous Rima LIII appears as part of everyday life, revealing its status as a popular song. The article also examines nineteenth-century manuals of metrics and literary preceptive texts that established Bécquer as a model for the lied and the ballad, shaping literary education in schools. Special attention is given to practices of imitation, translation, and parody carried out by Mexican women writers, for whom Bécquer served as both an aesthetic model and a means of poetic training. Through the analysis of poems by Lucía G. Herrera and Concepción Zamora, the article demonstrates how intertextuality with Rima LIII functioned as a formative and creative exercise. It concludes that Bécquer’s work played a decisive role in shaping nineteenth-century Mexican lyric sensibility.