Agustín Durán

Agustín Durán (born Oct. 14, 1793, Madrid, Spain—died Dec. 1, 1862, Madrid) was a Spanish literary critic, bibliographer, librarian, writer, and editor who was one of the major opponents of Neoclassicism and a major theoretician of Spanish Romanticism.

The son of a court physician, Durán was sent to the seminary at Vergara, studied at the University of Seville, and was admitted to the bar at Valladolid. He held a post in the education department at Madrid (1821–23) but was suspended for his political opinions. In 1834 he became secretary of the board for the censorship of the press and shortly afterward obtained a post in the national library at Madrid. Dismissed during the revolution of 1840, Durán was reinstated in 1843 and in 1854 was appointed chief librarian. He retired the following year.

Perhaps Durán’s best-known piece of criticism was his academy speech, Sobre el influjo que ha tenido la crítica moderna en la decadencia del teatro antiguo español (1828; “On the Influence That Modern Criticism Has Had on the Decadence of the Old Spanish Theatre”), which proposed that Spanish medieval and classical drama was more poetic than and so otherwise unlike the classical drama of Greece and France as to demand appreciation by different rules. Between 1828 and 1832 Durán compiled and edited two collections of ballads, Colección de romances antiguos (“Collection of Ancient Ballads”) and Colección de romances castellanas anteriores al siglo XVIII (“Collection of Castilian Ballads Prior to the 18th Century”), better known as Romancero general, or Romancero de Durán. He also was at least partly responsible for reviving the work of the Spanish dramatists Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega.