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Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Domínguez offers here an introduction to Manrique's poetry and the first book-length study of him in English in fifty years. After presenting the biographical and historical context of Manrique's poetry, Domínguez examines the poet's love lyrics, describing the large fund of commonplaces and forms that Manrique's verses share with those of other poets of his age. Manrique's highly stylized language and parallel verse structures express the obsession of the lover with the beloved. Moreover, his attention to parallel construe the world's greatest. In treatin...
An elegy composed on the death of his father, Jorge Manrique's 'Coplas' has occupied a prominent position in the literature of Spain from its original composition in the 15th century to the present day. The author of this book examines its sources, structure, transmission, critical reception and fame throughout the centuries.
Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique (c.1440-79) is one of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. Written shortly before the poet's death, it is a dignified elegy that speaks not just of a personal loss, that of the poet's father Rodrigo Manrique (d.1476), but of the evanescence of all things sub specie aeternitatis. Its popularity is aided by memorable lines, not least the two opening metaphors: man's life is a river meandering unto the sea of death (st. 3), and this world is the road to the next, the lasting dwelling place (st. 5). The poem replicates these reflections in its wending form. Its forty stanzas each comprise four tercets; each tercet is made up of two longer octosyllabic verses combined with one four-syllable half line known as pie quebrado. These regular broken lines, like beats of a heart, invest the poem with a resonant quality befitting the injunction at the opening of the poem to awaken one's slumbering soul to the passage of time: 'Recuerde el alma dormida, - avive el seso e despierte' (st. 1).