Castilian language poetry in nineteenth century Spain died in 1870 with Gustavo Adolfo B6cquer.* Only in Galician (Rosalia de Castro) and in Catalan (from Verdaguer to Maragall) was there a poetry worthy of the name. Not that in the last quarter of the century there did not exist good Castilian verse writers, but what they had to say tended to be prosaic. Nfifiez de Arce, for example, wrote what one might call oratorical verse, similar in content to the prose of his speeches in the Senate. Campoamor wrote epigrams, full of philosophy, of bourgeois philosophy. Both Nfiiez de Arce and Campoamor represent the society of the Bourbon Restoration of 1875 at its best and at its worst: verbal liberalism, real conservatism, a so-called common sense-let us not upset the apple cart; let us leave things as they are, no matter how they are, because any change is bound to be for the worse. The justification of this attitude may have been that Spain needed a period of rest after the upheavals of the previous decades. On the negative side, this was the attitude of those in power, of the leading classes, who seemed to lack faith in their country and in their people. It was the era in which it was possible to assert, as Silvela did, that Spain had lost her pulse. It was the era that inspired the philosophy of life summarized in the saying that in Spain there is no situation, no matter how bad, that cannot become worse. It was, then, an era not conducive to the exaltation that leads to poetry. There was of course a group of writers that did write magnificent prose, a prose that stands out within the historic literary tradition of Spanish realism, and within the prose writing of Europe of the time. Poetry, however, is made of other stuff and, as it has been said before, the last Castilian poetry of the nineteenth century had been that of B6cquer, a simple and pithy elegy on t e passing of love, life, and all earthly things. Thus, from 1870 to 1900, quite a lot of verse was written but not much