La vida inquieta de Manuel Reina

The critics usually consider Manuel Reina (1856-1905) a transitional author between nineteenth-century poetry and Spanish modernism. A thorough analysis of his most important work La vida inquieta (1894), published two years before Rubén Dario’s Prosas profanas, reveals, however, an innovation in aesthetics that makes him a significant forerunner. Reina contributes to turn-of-the-century Spanish poetry a renovation of the sensibility in terms of “art for art's sake,” the quest for ideal beauty, and an image of the poet as the hero for such an ideal. But the newly proclaimed faith in beauty also conveys consciousness of an emerging crisis arising from the very heart of modernity that Reina expressed through the emblematic title of his book: vida inquieta or spiritual uneasiness, doubts, spleen and complex states of mind.