Spanish poetry Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David H. Darst

Critical Essay by David H. Darst

SOURCE: Darst, David H. “Poetry and Politics in Jorge Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre.” Medievalia et Humanistica 13 (1985): 197-205.

In the following essay, Darst emphasizes the political motivation behind Jorge Manrique's elegy Coplas por la muerte de su padre.

Jorge Manrique's moving elegy to his father has been a perennial favorite with the masses as well as the critics since its diffusion shortly after the soldier poet's own death in 1479.¹ Since the appearance of Pedro Salinas's fundamental study of the poem in 1947,² this monument of fifteenth-century Spanish poetry has received an especially large number of valuable studies.³ The political background has been exhaustively detailed by Antonio Serrano de Haro;⁴ and the basic three-part structure, consisting of exposition (strophes I-XIII), evocation of don Rodrigo Manrique's generation (strophes XIV-XXIV), and laudatory dirge (strophes XXV-XL), has been analyzed repeatedly, most recently by Charles V. Aubrun and Gustavo...
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