Ramón de Campoamor

Ramón de Campoamor
Portrayed around 1900
Senator of the Kingdom
In office 1888 – 1890; 1891; 1896
Constituency	the provinces of Murcia, León and Orense
Personal details
Born	(1817-09-24)September 24, 1817 Navia
Died	February 11, 1901(1901-02-11) (aged 83) Madrid
Occupation	Poet
Signature
Writing career
Genre	Realism

Ramón de Campoamor portrayed in Los Poetas contemporáneos by Antonio María Esquivel, 1846 - Museo del Prado, Madrid

Ramón María de las Mercedes (Pérez) de Campoamor y Campoosorio (Piñera, Navia, September 24, 1817 – Madrid, February 11, 1901) was a Spanish poet of literary realism.

Biography

He was born in the village of Piñera, in Navia, Asturias, on September 24, 1817 (the same year as José Zorrilla, with whom he was frequently compared). His father, Miguel Pérez Campoamor, was a wealthy farmer born in the municipality of Coaña, and his mother belonged to the noble Campo Osorio family of Navia. In 1821, when Ramón had not yet turned four, his father died. At the age of ten he began studying Latin and Humanities in Puerto de Vega, where he obtained his certificate of primary studies.

Dante's Inferno was a poor apprentice compared with the twisted inventions of infernal punishments that the teaching clerics put into my tender and sensitive little childish head. The whole course of my early years has been a dark dream, from which I believe I have not yet finished waking.

— Ramón de Campoamor

In 1832, at fifteen, he left to study philosophy, logic and mathematics at the convent of Santo Tomás in Madrid. Shortly afterwards he enrolled in medicine at the university in Madrid, but this endeavor did not last either. A professor vehemently advised him to devote himself to literature, since he believed he had discovered in him a natural inclination toward letters rather than the sciences (he vomited during dissections). The only things he did not dislike were reading and writing (he spent long hours reading the classics in the National Library), so he finally devoted himself to journalism and literature. Espronceda took him under his patronage, and his first poem dates from 1837: he contributed to Romantic publications such as El Alba and No Me Olvides and was an editor of Las Musas (1837), El Correo Nacional (1838) and El Español (1845); he directed El Estado in 1856.

He frequented the Liceo and, at the age of twenty, in 1837, he published in the magazine No me olvides an article titled "Acerca del estado actual de nuestra poesía" ("On the current state of our poetry"), in which he attacked "degraded Romanticism," made up of "bloody scenes, horrifying dreams, atrocious crimes, execrations, deliriums and everything most barbarous and antisocial that man can imagine," and proposed another Romanticism, more concerned with morality, that would make man better, not worse. In 1838 he published his first printed work: Una mujer generosa, a comedy in two acts that was never staged in a theater. Another dramatic work of his was El castillo de Santa Marina (1838), in which he gives concrete form to many Romantic commonplaces with some specific landscape and historical-legendary features of Asturias; in those years he also wrote comedies such as La fineza del querer (1840) and El hijo de todos (1841) and became a friend of the playwright Tomás Rodríguez Rubí; and after a more or less long interval, in 1870 he wrote what is perhaps his best-known work, Guerra a la guerra (1870), which was followed by the sacred drama El hombre Dios (1871), and Cuerdos y locos (1873), the drama Dies irae (1873), Los salvajes (1875), and the comic piece Después de la boda (1876). In the 1880s he ended his dramatic career by devoting himself to the monologues Cómo rezan las solteras (1884), El amor o la muerte (1884), El confesor confesado and El anillo de boda. His Obras completas were prepared posthumously; they include the comedy El honor (1874), the one most in keeping with the procedures of the new symbolist school; the dramatic dolora El palacio de las verdades (1871), which is the one that best lends itself to being classified as allegorical; the comedies Química conyugal (1877) and Glorias humanas (1885); and the drama Así se escribe la historia, which he declined to publish because it had not been to the public's liking.

In 1838 he had begun his career as a poet; he published his first Romantic verses in the book Ternezas y flores. However, it is in Ayes del alma (1842), his second book of lyric poetry, that he begins to move away from Romanticism, although traces of Espronceda still remain in it; in another book, Fábulas, also from 1842, the three genres that the poet was to create and cultivate are already prefigured, with their essential characteristics: his highly personal doloras, pequeños poemas (little poems) and humoradas, which ascribe him to the aesthetics of realism. The author himself defined these genres as follows:

What is a humorada? A pointed stroke. And a dolora? A humorada turned into drama. And a little poem? An amplified dolora.

In 1846 he published his first collection of Doloras (more than thirty editions in Spain during the author's lifetime), as well as his study Filosofía de las leyes, of a reactionary character.

Campoamor set forth the philosophy of personalism, which he expounded in a long essay of 1855. In 1886 he published the Humoradas (2nd ed. 1888); he continued writing them until his death, and they were defined by Leopoldo Alas "Clarín" as "detritus of an illusion" and "abrupt lessons of experience"; at times an "anticipation of greguerías" for Luis Cernuda.

As a philosopher, Ramón de Campoamor was a monarchist, traditionalist and moderate man in politics, and he was especially attracted to positivism. His friends, who later were the editors of his Obras completas, already noted the link between his philosophy and that of Schelling.

He was controversial from his first book of philosophy in 1846, Filosofía de las leyes, which according to La Censura contained "propositions contrary to Catholic doctrine, erroneous or inducing to error, false, immoral, and offensive and insulting to our religion and its holy institutions." In 1855 he published El personalismo. Apuntes para una filosofía. In 1862, Polémicas con la democracia, which had a second, expanded edition in 1873. More successful was Lo absoluto (1865), a work that had an impact in academic circles and was used as a textbook in the universities. He engaged in polemics with Emilio Castelar over his pamphlet La fórmula del progreso, with the Krausists in 1875, and, on questions of aesthetics and poetics, with Juan Valera, the latter texts being collected in La metafísica y la poesía (1891). A strict monarchist, he accompanied the Queen to France after the Revolution of 1868; he returned to France in 1882, when he went to Paris to meet with the publishers of his work in France and Germany. In 1883 he published his Poética (2nd expanded ed. in 1890), deliberately written against the work of the same name by Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, one of his enemies (he opposed his entry into the Real Academia, together with Alejandro Pidal y Mon), and El ideísmo, a book of metaphysics.

In 1842 he began his political career and published Ayes del alma, with poems dedicated to the Queen and former Regent María Cristina. Preparing his future, he published laudatory profiles of public figures in his Historia crítica de las Cortes reformadoras (1845); this won him so many friends that his political career took off strongly. At the end of the 1840s he joined the Moderate Party, following his political ideas, which consisted of great fervor for Queen Isabella II and, in general, for the monarchy as the form of organization of the State.

Ramón de Campoamor in 1847

He was appointed royal councilor in 1846; in 1847 he was appointed civil governor of the Province of Castellón and a little later of Alicante, of which he was named adoptive son.

Around that time he married Guillermina O'Gorman, a young lady from a well-to-do Irish family, whose substantial dowry made him, if he was not one already, a wealthy bourgeois afflicted by gout. The wedding took place in the old Hermitage of Fabraquer, located in San Juan de Alicante, and they had no children.

In 1850 he was elected to a seat in the Congress of Deputies and was given the post of civil governor of Valencia in 1851, which he held until 1854. He was elected again as deputy to the Cortes for the conservative party in 1857 and then appointed Director General of Charity and Health, Councilor of State, and academician of the Language, seat «E» (uppercase), from 1861. He was Senator of the Kingdom for the provinces of Murcia, León and Orense.

In short, it can be said of Campoamor that he was an honest, hardworking and even self-sacrificing politician and public administrator.

Statue of Ramón de Campoamor in Campoamor Park in Navia.

Regarding his political posts, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán wrote:

Campoamor was frank in his satires even when they affected him. Romero Robledo, a man who "made" the elections from the Ministry of the Interior, obtained a deputy's seat for the great poet, and when he was asked which district he was deputy for, Campoamor invariably answered: "For Romero Robledo." He was a generous and splendid man. Suffice it to say that he gave all his works to the publishers because he did not reconcile art with profit... And I confess that my Marquis of Bradomín is inspired by Campoamor, and many of his traits are not autobiographical, as some believe, but belong to the author of the "Doloras"

— 

He came to be known and admired in Spain and throughout Hispanic America, in spite of his scandalous ripios —or perhaps thanks to them—:

The daughters of the mothers I loved so much
now kiss me as one kisses a saint.

His wife died in 1890, but his nephews and nieces cared for him and, when his ailments allowed, he attended the tertulia of the Librería de Fe bookshop in Madrid. He died in that city on February 11, 1901, at the age of 83. His remains lie in the San Justo Cemetery in Madrid, beside those of his wife, where in 1909 the mausoleum built by the Asturian sculptor Cipriano Folgueras was completed. In 1913 another sculpture was dedicated to him in his birthplace, Navia, the work of Aurelio Carretero; and later even a sculptural group was erected to him in Madrid's Retiro Park, by Lorenzo Coullaut Valera (1876–1932), in 1914. During his lifetime he had refused every prize. When he was told, in his last days, that a dramatic work of his had been successfully revived, he remarked: "I don't know how you liked it; after having read Ibsen, everything seems old-fashioned and insignificant." Regarding his life, Campoamor himself said:

The best portrait of me would be the following: "He read to entertain himself; he wrote to amuse himself, he lived doing his neighbor all the good he could, and he will die gladly so as to forget the harm that many neighbors did him" [...] My biography is very simple: that of some of my detractors will be a little more complicated, for in matters of intellectual rashness I confess myself a sinner and say, like the philosopher: Do they speak ill of me? Well, if they knew other faults I have, they would speak even worse.

— 

His Obras completas (Madrid 1901–1903, 8 vols.) were prepared by his friends Urbano González Serrano, Vicente Colorado and Mariano Ordóñez. Biographies of him were written by Antonio Sánchez Pérez (1889), Emilia Pardo Bazán (1891), Cipriano Rivas Cherif (1921) and Manuel Lombardero (2000).

The duel with Topete

In 1863, the appointment of Augusto Ulloa y Castañón as Minister of the Navy in the government of O'Donnell provoked the rejection of the officer corps, and Campoamor, a furious defender of the Isabelline monarchy, then wrote an article against the commanders of the Navy, in which he said: "Why do you not like Mr. Ulloa? Because he has never caught an oyster in his life?" The naval officers, as soon as they read it in La Época, appointed Juan Bautista Topete to challenge Campoamor to a duel. And since the latter, although kind and jovial, never refused an encounter at arms, he accepted the challenge of the impetuous Topete.

Campoamor's seconds were General Reina and the Baron of Villatardi. Topete's were the Navy generals Quesada and Prast. The duel was arranged with sabers and took place at the Salamanca estate. During the duel, Campoamor ended up wounding him on the forehead. Topete, his face bloodied, let out a roar and threw himself at the poet. The latter parried and wounded him a second time on the right hand, disarming him. Then the brave sailor exclaimed in rage:

Damnation! What will my comrades say?

General Reina, stepping between them, answered him:

They will say that you have been brave; but with weapons it is chance that strikes.

Campoamor immediately went up to Topete and embraced him, and from then on they were good comrades.

Style

The poetry of Ramón de Campoamor is characteristic of Spanish literary realism. It is marked by its prosaism, which consciously shuns the beauty of all idealization. Campoamor was aware of the innovative character of his poetry, since he had devised a poetic language that would confront that of the heirs of Manuel José Quintana (himself an heir of the classical poetic dialect and of the constant epithet of Fernando de Herrera) and the no less artificial dialect of the Romantics. He heralds a return to the plain and authentic language that would serve as a model for the prose of Juan de Mairena and the philosophical verse of Antonio Machado. However, his lack of formal care has not withstood the test of time, for which reason he was detested by the later Modernismo because of his total lack of aestheticism, and by the Generation of '98 for his bourgeois and vulgar character and his nineteenth-century stamp. In Poética he expressed his concept of lyric poetry in general:

Poetry is the rhythmic representation of a thought by means of an image, expressed in a language that cannot be said in prose either more naturally or in fewer words... Only rhythm should separate the language of verse from that of prose... Since art for art's sake and the special dialect of classicism are distasteful to me, my constant endeavor has been to arrive at art through the idea and to express the latter in common language, revolutionizing the substance and the form of poetry.

Works

• Obras completas (Madrid 1901–1903, 8 vols.)
• Obras poéticas completas, 1949, 1951, 1972.

Theater

• Una mujer generosa (1838)
• El castillo de Santa Marina (1838)
• La fineza del querer (1840)
• El hijo de todos (1841)
• Guerra a la guerra (1870).
• El hombre Dios (1871)
• El palacio de las verdades (1871)
• Cuerdos y locos (1873)
• Dies irae (1873)
• El honor (1874)
• Así se escribe la historia (1875)
• Los salvajes (1875)
• Después de la boda (1876)
• Química conyugal (1877)
• Cómo rezan las solteras (1884)
• El amor o la muerte (1884)
• Glorias humanas (1885)
• El confesor confesado
• El anillo de boda

Poetry

• Ternezas y flores, Romantic verses, 1838.
• Poesías, 1840
• Ayes del alma, 1842.
• Fábulas originales, 1842.
• Doloras, 1846.
• Poesías y fábulas, 1847.
• El drama universal, 1853. (There is a modern edition from 2008).
• Colón 1853.
• El licenciado Torralba, poema en ocho cantos, 1888.
• Pequeños poemas (1872–1874)
• Los buenos y los sabios: poema en cinco cantos, 1881.
• Humoradas (1886–1888).
• Don Juan: pequeño poema, 1886.
• Los amores de una santa: poema en cartas, 1886.
• Fábulas completas, 1941.

El tren expreso

Philosophy

• Filosofía de las leyes (1846)
• El personalismo, apuntes para una filosofía (1855)
• La metafísica limpia, fija y da esplendor al lenguaje (1862)
• Lo absoluto (1865)
• Poética (1883)
• El ideísmo (1883)
• La originalidad y el plagio
• Sócrates
• La Metafísica y la poesía ante la ciencia moderna
• Sobre el panenteísmo.

Other works

• Historia crítica de las Cortes reformadoras, 1837.
• Los manuscritos de mi padre: novela original, 1842.
• Polémicas, 1862.
• Discursos parlamentarios
• Polémicas con la democracia
• Cánovas, 1884.
• "Prologue" to La Mujer, by Severo Catalina.
• "Prologue" to the Fábulas by Antonio Campos y Carreras.
• "Prologue" to Cosas del Mundo.

External links

• Works by Ramón de Campoamor on Wikilivres.
• Biography and selection of poems on Los Poetas
• Senator Don Ramón de Campoamor
• Digitized works by Ramón de Campoamor in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Ramón de Campoamor in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes