Esteban Manuel de Villegas - Works

Works

Villegas wrote a lyrical book that was very original for its time, "Las Eróticas" (Nájera, 1618, later widely reprinted, especially by Sancha in Madrid, 1774 and 1797), the cover of which bore under a rising sun the motto "Me surgente, quid istae?". This book earned him more than a few enemies because of his excessive pride, and he tried to suppress the emblem of the copies that he could; Lope de la Vega referred to this in his Laurels for Apollo, but did not mention Villegas by name.

The book is divided into two parts; the first is written in heptasyllables, imitation of Anacreontic style and matter; the second is in endecasyllables, being historical in content. It contained very delicate poems in short meters, which he managed with special skill. This book of poems contains very free translations of Horace, elegies, idylls, epigrams and some sonnets. It handles the syllables quantitatively and it uses Sapphic, Adonic, and Anacreontic meters rather than the forms then current in Spanish literature. This is why his poetry is purely formal, strictly following form and with many circumlocutions. For this reason he set a strong precedent for Neoclassicism in the 18th century. His longer works have a strong flavour of culterano, as in his Ode to Philip III. His intention to introduce quantitative meter only appears in his introduction to the "adónicos sáficos", since these lend themselves well to a hendecasyllabic form:

Dulce vecino de la verde selva,

huésped eterno del abril florido,

vital aliento de la madre Venus,

céfiro blando.

He also, fortunately, tried to adapt Spanish poetry to the Anacreontic style; he was imitated during the 18th century in this lyric subgenre, specially cultivated in Villegas' style, particularly by Juan Meléndez Valdés and José Iglesias de la Casa. Also his gracefully rhythmic pastoral "Cantilenas" was much imitated. At an advanced age, he translated Boethius' "De consolatione Philosophiae" and, wiser after his encounter with the Inquisition, left in Latin the part corresponding to free will. He wrote in addition two volumes to "Disertaciones" in which he commented on the classics which had been lost. This work was lost into the hands of Father Martín Sarmiento shortly thereafter. In addition he composed "Discurso contra las comedias" and "Antiteatro", which were never published.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.