José María Luis Bruna, Second Marqués de Campo (1877–1916): A Forgotten Poet of the fin-de-siècle Symbolist Decadence

Abstract

The Marqués de Campo barely figures in the literary histories of fin de siglo poetic practice. His works have, almost entirely, fallen into obscurity. The re-publication in 2006 of his second poetic collection, Alma glauca of 1904, the high point of the new Symbolist-Decadent poetic experiment, affords us the opportunity to re-assess this forgotten poet. This collection reveals a poet of some talent whose travels in Greece and the Levant made real the vogue in finisecular Europe for the evocation of Ancient Greece and its sexual mores. The collection’s opening poem, with its epigraph from Jean Lorrain’s ‘Monsieur de Phocas’ and its evocation of Antinous, ephebes and youthful male dancers sets the tone of sexual subversion. As other poems confirm, a ‘love that cannot speak its name’ features in many poems, and is often portrayed with Parnassian elegance. Allusions to Ancient Greek rites serve to present subversive male relationships. By contrast, the poet also deals with the more traditional themes of the Symbolist Decadence: the Fatal Woman, les fleurs du mal, the Jardin des supplices; he uses perverse and artificial effects and shows the Parnassian obsession with precious objects and jewels. In tune with his contemporaries, the Marqués de Campo also expresses an all-pervasive mal du siècle. The present article seeks to bring his poetry, which has been marginalized in literary histories, to a wider public.