Autobiography of José María Blanco White

The Autobiography of José María Blanco White was published posthumously in 1845. It is a testimony of the vicissitudes of a Christian of Catholic origin in the shaping of his personality. Blanco White is referred to in Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos españoles as one of his nineteenth-century heretics.
In the words of Menéndez y Pelayo

«… the only one who, writing in a foreign language, has shown qualities of original and nervous prose writer.”

However, a reading of this Autobiography will put the reader before a much more complex scenario. For Blanco White, certain elements of Catholic worship are closer to pagan ritual. It also takes from extreme eroticism or irrational and fetishistic worship than from a religious experience.
As the critic Francisco Rico says:

«… this Sevillian poet may have been one of the first Spanish romantic poets if a restless life and his liberal tendencies had not led him to emigrate to London. From there he will act as a bridge between the exiled liberals and English romanticism, a decisive task for the subsequent outbreak of Romanticism in our country. One can hardly find a more representative image of the romantic artist than that of a stormy and nocturnal sea, a reflection of the anxieties of his soul.”

Translation by Antonio Garnica.