El vínculo entre modernidad y romanticismo en Octavio Paz y Rafael Argullol

This article presents and confronts two views concerning the link between modernity and romanticism. On the one hand, the view proposed by the Nobel Prize winner, the Mexican Octavio Paz in his book Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, and, on the other hand, the one put forward by the prolific Spanish writer Rafael Argullol in his El Héroe y el Único. El espíritu trágico del romanticismo. While for O. Paz the romantic movement as a child of modernity has inspired partially the modern search for the new in itself, for R. Argullol the romantic spirit is expression above all of a tragic-heroic mood of dissatisfaction with modernity. Both writers see the paradoxical nature of romanticism –sometimes longing for the past, sometimes dreaming about the future– as a complex expression of modernity’s self-awareness and self-criticism.