“ POESÍAS DEL SIGLO XIX MANUEL JOSÉ QUINTANA. A Tyrtæan poet whose lyrics, together with those of his friend Gallego (cf. p. 244) , voice the sentiments of a party sprung up to combat the French invader. As patriots, both Quintana and Gallego were bitterly opposed to French domination; as poets they meekly submitted to the French classic rules and carried on the traditions of Luzán and Meléndez Valdés. The heroic odes of Quintana are the best that he has given us. ”

“ ÍÑIGO LÓPEZ DE MENDOZA, MARQUÉS DE SANTILLANA. Perhaps the most impressive literary figure of the fifteenth century. The nephew of López de Ayala, he belongs partly to the Middle Ages, but largely also to the Renaissance. Amador de los Ríos, who has given us the best edition of his works (Madrid, 1852) , as well as an excellent account of his life and genius, divides Santillana’s productions into five classes: obras de amores, obras doctrinales é históricas, sonetos fechos al itálico modo, obras devotas, obras de recreación. ”

“ Of course we have to do only with the lyric tradition which has found expression in the language of Castile. It is not to be forgotten, however, that it is but one out of several lyric traditions that have flourished within the bounds of Spain; for the Spaniard can point with pride to a poetic production in Latin which extended from the Silver Age of Latin literature well into the Middle Ages, and he knows, too, that the Arabs and the Hebrews who settled on his soil composed and sang in their respective tongues. ”

“ Modeled on the French pastourelle or the Provençal pastorela, it shows, like the Spanish heroic legend, the influence of the region whence most of the mediæval Occident derived its first poetic inspiration. Another precious example of lyrism at this early date is a song with certain popular elements in it,—the Cántica de la Virgen, introduced by Berceo into his religious poem, El duelo de la Virgen.
One may marvel that there was so slight an output of Castilian lyric verse at a time when Castile had already begun to be quite active in a literary way. However, the reason is not far to seek. ”

“ The oldest and most typical of the Spanish ballads have been edited by Wolf and Hoffman in their Primavera y flor de romances, Berlin, 1856 (reprinted by Menéndez y Pelayo in his Antología, vols. 8 and 9) , and practically the whole of them are to be found in A. Durán’s Romancero General, Madrid, 1849, 1851 (vols. 10 and 16 of the Biblioteca de autores españoles) . The great majority of the romances are in octosyllabic lines bearing the stress on the seventh syllable and having assonance—that is, vowel rhyme only, as distinguished from vowel and consonant rhyme—in the alternate lines. ”

“ From that period we have preserved one of the greatest monuments of Old Spanish letters, the epic Poema del Cid. To heroic poetry as instanced by this poem on Roderick of Bivar, which, like most of the early epic legends or cantares de gesta of Castile, must have been produced under the influence of the French chansons de geste, there succeeded, in the thirteenth century, a body of religious and didactic verse, a good part of which is due to the industrious cleric, Gonzalo de Berceo. Very few lyric compositions in Castilian can be found in this century. ”

“ Mysticism, ever a prominent characteristic of the Spanish temperament, finds most pleasing expression, during the sixteenth century, in the lyrics of a number of clerical writers. The most attractive of them all is Luis de León, deservedly ranked among the greatest Spanish lyric poets. In him an Italian influence, and the humanizing impress of the Renaissance are also visible.
The Italian manner is henceforth, and throughout the seventeenth century, the dominant one in Spanish verse. It is unnecessary to mention the numerous lyrists who adopted it. ”

“ The opening years of the nineteenth century witnessed a passionate outburst of Spanish patriotism, which found poetic utterance in the odes directed against the Napoleonic invader by the Tyrtæan poet Quintana, by his friend Gallego and other authors. Although leveled against the French, these compositions were framed in obedience to the canons of the French poetic lawgivers. The rules of French classicism prevailed also in the works of the members of a school made up mainly of young clerics, who had their centre at Seville. ”

“ FERNÁN PÉREZ DE GUZMÁN. The nephew of one poet, the Canciller López de Ayala, and the uncle of another, the Marqués de Santillana, Pérez de Guzmán has left us in the Cancioneros a few poems in the Provençal-Galician manner with traces of Italian influence. He is more important as a prose writer than as a poet, being one of the best of the early Spanish historians. ”

“ At the very outset of the seventeenth century there manifested itself in Spanish poetry the vitiating influence of Góngora, a writer whose bombastic and obscure style, termed Gongorism after its originator, wrought the same harm in Spanish letters that Marinism wrought in Italy and Euphuism in England. The mannerisms of Góngora were imitated by later poets, so that his school persisted throughout the century, despite the reaction to sanity attempted by the Argensolas, and the satirist Quevedo. ”

“ POESÍAS DEL SIGLO XVIII IGNACIO DE LUZÁN. The founder of the so-called French school of writers of the eighteenth century, who by subordinating literary production in Spain to the rigid rules that obtained in French literature sought to correct the license that prevailed in Spanish letters of the time. Luzán declared the aims and tenets of the new school in his Poética (1737) . He was stronger as a critic than as a creative spirit. Cf. vol. I of the Poetas líricos del siglo XVIII in the Biblioteca de autores españoles; Ticknor III, 263 ff. ”

“ GONZALO DE BERCEO. Gonzalo de Berceo is the first Castilian poet known to us by name. He is mentioned in documents ranging in date from the second decade to the middle of the thirteenth century. From his birthplace, the village of Berceo, he early passed to the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, and there he remained, as a secular priest, throughout his life. Most of his work consists of religious, legendary and narrative verse, in the production of which he was most prolific. ”

“ As has been said, assonance excludes the rhyme of consonants and requires that of vowels alone, from the accented vowel on: clàro—mármol, blànco—amàron. But in words accented on the third last syllable (esdrújulos) or any syllable farther removed from the end (sobresdrújulos) , the syllables between the accented one and the last unaccented one are disregarded; so, cándido—diáfano—párvulo—enviándotelos, all form a good assonance in à—o. In accented diphthongs and triphthongs, agreement of the vowels bearing the accent is the sole requirement: piàno—clàustro, ve—agraciéis. ”

“ Use of the present Anthology in the Spanish classes at Harvard University has shown that Spanish verse appeals to the imagination of the English-speaking student. On that account, the editor now ventures to offer this book for general academic use. The volume should not be without a certain popular value also, since many poems are included in it that through translations have been introduced into English literature, and, like Longfellow’s version of the Coplas of Manrique, have there made their fortune. ”

“ In strophic compositions, unrhymed antepenults may terminate certain lines occurring at regular intervals in the poem. Consonant rhyme should be avoided in assonanced poems. In modern Spanish, the assonance of alternate lines is the rule, and, if the composition is short, the one assonance may run all the way through it.
Blank verse.—Lines lacking both consonantal and vocalic rhyme occur and are called versos sueltos (blank verse) . Into compositions in verso suelto consonantal rhyme may, however, enter, particularly at the end of the chief sections into which the subject matter is divided. ”

“ JOSÉ DE ESPRONCEDA. Considered by many as the most illustrious lyric poet of Spain in the nineteenth century. In Espronceda, the author of the Estudiante de Salamanca, of the fragmentary lyrico-dramatic poem El diablo mundo, and of various short lyrics, are represented both that romantic element of revolt against social and literary conventions which in England is so strongly marked in Byron, and the element of Bohemianism which characterizes many of the French romanticists. ”

“ Examples of octaves in eight-syllabled trochaics and seven-syllabled iambics are also found. An older form of the octave was the so-called Copla (“stanza”) de arte mayor, a stanza containing eight lines of four amphibrachs (or twelve syllables) each, and rhyming according to the scheme a b b a a c c a; [2] cf. p. 31.
2: As opposed to the term arte mayor, there was used that of arte menor, applied in general to any verse of not more than eight syllables in length.
The sonnet—a short poem of fourteen hendecasyllables—is of Italian origin and has the conventional Italian forms. ”

“ EL CONDESTABLE ÁLVARO DE LUNA. Prominent among the two hundred or more poets of the reign of Juan II. was the courtier Álvaro de Luna. For a long time he enjoyed the favor of the monarch, who even raised him to one of the highest ranks to which a subject could attain, but, incurring the hatred of his fickle master, he was persecuted and finally executed in 1453. His tragic career has been several times treated in Spanish verse and prose. In his poems conventional gallantry borders on what the devout would call blasphemy. ”

“ Luzán’s ideas found favor and, despite the counter-efforts of García de la Huerta, a champion of the older Spanish methods and a bitter opponent of innovations, the disciples of Luzán began to compose dramas and lyrics according to the Gallic laws. The most important lyrist of the new movement was Meléndez-Valdés, about whom gathered the so-called Salamancan school of poets. Of these the best was Cienfuegos, who most nearly approached his master Meléndez in the skill with which he versified according to the precepts from abroad. ”

“ Much has been made of French influence upon Hita, but, when all is said and done, that influence is restricted to a small proportion of his work, and he remains eminently Spanish in manner, although, for his verse forms, he has had recourse to Galician-Provençal models. These same models were present to the mind of the Chancellor López de Ayala for the lyrics contained in his satiric and didactic Rimado de Palacio, written in the second half of the fourteenth century, and in the fifteenth century they were followed by a whole host of verse writers. ”

“ Imitating the scheme of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and largely influenced also by Lucan, Mena here seeks to picture the vicissitudes of Fortune. Elaborate but cold, the work was a great favorite with his contemporaries. At times, as in these octaves celebrating the luckless Galician troubadour Macías, a martyr of love, Mena rises to a respectable lyric height. Other ambitious poetical works of his are the Coronación and the Coplas de los siete pecados mortales. Note the dactylic (—́ ‿ ‿) rhythm of the present versos de arte mayor. ”

“ The Latin quantitative principle in versification has given way in Spanish to that of syllabification simply. Account is taken, as a rule, not of the greater or less length of the vowel in the syllabic, but of the number of the syllables in a line and of their rhythmical accent.
(α) Vowels and Syllables Within a Word.
A problem of importance is to determine, when two or more vowels come together, whether they form one syllable or more. The vowels are either strong (a, e, o) or weak (i, y, u) , and they come together under three chief conditions ”

“ Into this latter region, as into Portugal generally, the wandering troubadours from Provence had early penetrated, singing everywhere their erotic strains, until, at length, the native poets began to imitate the Provençal manner in their own language, the Galician-Portuguese. Of their amorous and other lyric verse quite an amount is preserved in various Cancioneiros, and these also contain the poems of Castilians xvii and southern Spaniards, who, like the monarch of Castile, Alfonso el Sabio, composed in Galician-Portuguese. ”

“ EPÍSTOLA SATÍRICA AL CONDE DE OLIVARES
No he de callar por más que con el dedo,
Ya tocando la boca, ó ya la frente,
Silencio avises, ó amenaces miedo.
¿No ha de haber un espíritu valiente? 10
¿Siempre se ha de sentir lo que se dice? ”

“ Manuel María de Arjona
(1771–1820) ESPAÑA RESTAURADA EN CÁDIZ
(Oda dedicada á la memoria de Juan de Padilla)
Sal del sepulcro, deja tu mancilla,
Revístete de luz y de grandeza,
O sombra glorïosa de Padilla,
Que grata España á venerar empieza, 10
La España, que á un patíbulo afrentoso
(¡Gime, oh patria!) la vida vió entregada
Del ciudadano fiero y generoso
Por quien Castilla fuera reengendrada. ”

“ His whole career reminds one strongly of that of the French cleric François Villon, like whom Ruiz is one of the first modern poets to strike a peculiarly personal note. In his Libro de buen amor (published in the Biblioteca de autores castellanos, volume 57, as Libro de los cantares) he is frankly improper and shows in a marked degree the influence of Ovid’s works, of the Pamphilus de Amore, a mediæval imitation of Ovid, and of various Old French works. ”

“ MARCELINO MENÉNDEZ Y PELAYO. One of the most illustrious literary critics of our age, a scholar of rare erudition, a poet whose verse is ever harmonious and graceful. Several of his critical works have been mentioned in these notes. His best poems may be found in the volume Odas, epístolas y tragedias, Madrid, 1883. The humanistic bent of the man prevails even in his lyrics. Cf. Blanco-García, II, 601 ff. ”

“ VENTURA DE LA VEGA. Dramatist and poet; born in the Argentine Republic, he was trained in Spain, where he passed the greater part of his life, becoming private secretary to Isabel II. His imitations of the Hebrew poetry of the Bible are praiseworthy. In most of his verse he displays an eclectic tendency, a desire to combine the best in romanticism with the best in classicism. ”