Most twentieth-century historiographers agree that Spanish Romanticism was a failure. However, their conceptions of the movement and chronologies differ greatly. The reception and translation of foreign literatures were determinant for the development of Spanish Romanticism, but reception and translation processes were extremely uneven. The political upheavals that took place in the country in the first decades of the nineteenth century gave way to a struggle for legitimation, a reference to Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production. The dominant group used censorship as an instrument to repress the introduction of the new discourse in the literary field. The dominated group responded by translating foreign works belonging to Romantic ideology and aesthetics. This paper explores the relevance of this struggle for both the perception of failure and the critical controversy surrounding the movement from the nineteenth century until the present.