Spanish poetry Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Carl Ralph Borgia

Critical Essay by Carl Ralph Borgia

SOURCE: Borgia, Carl Ralph. “Notes on Dante in the Spanish Allegorical Poetry of Imperial, Santillana, and Mena.” Hispanófila 27, no. 81 (May 1984): 1-10.

In the following essay, Borgia traces the influence of Dantean allegory on the poetry of Francisco Imperial, Juan de Mena, and the Marqués de Santillana.

Historical critics have used the presence of symbolic dreams or visions in the poetry of Francisco Imperial, the Marqués de Santillana and Juan de Mena to study the relationship of these poets with the previous body of allegorical literature in Spain, Italy and France.¹ The major concern has been to decide which country had most influence on the above Spanish poets. What prevails in this criticism is a system of weights and balances that in any given case only concludes that one source may have had more influence than another. Florence Street's “The Allegory of Fortune and the Imitation of Dante...
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