Love and remembrance: the poetry of Jorge Manrique

Abstract

Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Dominquez 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, Dominquez 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. Morever, his attention to parallel constructions, to language patterning, and to the expressive quality of his lyric verse, Dominquez shows, prepared the poet for the creation of the Coplas on the death of his father, his major work and a poem that has come to be recognized as one of the world's greatest. In treating the Coplas, Dominquez not only offers a sensitive reading of the elegy but also examines questions of text, structure, and style. Like the love lyrics, the Coplas presents a high incidence of parallel structures that make for clarity and symmetry. Dominquez also finds that the complex stylistic relationships of the verses provide the Coplas with a unity that is deeper and more fundamental than has generally been perceived. This study, eclectic in its critical approaches, will be the standard English work on Manrique for years to come.