in the Poetry of Silver Age

exile as well as the Quixotic spirit, the fruit of passion. Like Don
Quixote, he feels like one confined who fights alone, and like the
noble Hidalgo (knight) what interests him is only the "universal
and eternal finallty of his goals". For this reason, he fights for an
ideal, although nobody else might share it,,4. There is a clear
identification of Unamuno with Don Quixote, in a well known
confessional passage of Cómo se hace una novela (How a novel is
written) while referring to the stoning of Don Quixote by the galley
slaves who he had freed, he points out that he himself will be
stoned by the present storrntroopers of the Holy Brotherhood "of
my Spain", as an apostle of his personal Spain that~he tries to save.
He thus, proclaims Quixotism as a kind of faith in knightly ideals.
As proof of the obsession that Unamuno had for the figure
of Don Quixote we need to look at his book De Fuerteventura a
Paris (From Fuerteventura to Paris) (1925). Here. he brings
together the poetry written during rus confinement and exile at the
hands of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The reference to Don
Quixote in a frequenUy cÍted sonnet is a Httle enigmatic (XVII)5:
Tu evangelio, mi señor Don Quijote,
al pecho de tu pueblo cual venablo
lancé, y el muy bellaco en el establo
sigue lamiendo el mango de su azote.
y pues que en él no hay de tu seso un brote,
me vuelvo a los gentiles y les hablo
tus hazañas, haciendo de San Pablo
de tu fe, ya que así me toca en lote.
4 A. Urrutia Jordana, 2003, p. 147.
5 M. de Unamuno, 1987. Henceforth we will indicate in brackets the
number of the pocm, as it figures in all the editions, in order to help in
searching for it.
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