Francisco Brines and the Classical Tradition: «El otoño de las rosas»

Abstract

Francisco Brines (1932-2021), winner of the Cervantes Prize 2020, published his collection of poems El otoño de las rosas in 1986, in which, having moved away from the social poetry of the poetic group of the 1950s, he explores the theme of love. In this paper we analyse how the poet, at the onset of vital decadence (autumn), faces love passion (roses) with pessimism, as he clearly establishes the equivalence youth = life and decadence = death; and how, from a position of magister amoris, he resorts to the (re)writing of well-known classical clichés such as carpe diem, collige, virgo, rosas, foedus amoris, tempus fugit and proelium amoris, among others, to express this pessimism.