Juan de Mena - Works

Works

Mena was considered by his contemporaries to be the outstanding poet of his time, and his knowledge of Latin and the Classics was greatly admired. His activities at the court of Juan II brought him into contact with many important figures; the most significant friendship that resulted was with Íñigo López de Mendoza. It persisted until the end of Mena’s life despite important political differences.

His poetry frequently appeared in cancioneros (collections of verse), such as the Cancionero general of Hernando del Castillo, and his works were well-known throughout the sixteenth century, influencing later Spanish poets, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Góngora. The extensive commentary that accompanied later editions of Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna, such as those of Hernán Núñez (1499) and Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1582), provide further evidence of the extent of his literary influence in Spain. His style is marked by its frequent use of Latinisms and hyperbaton, as well as by mentions of a wide array of figures from Greco-Roman mythology. In his imitation of classical and medieval sources, such as Dante, Mena helped stretch the capabilities of a fledgling Castilian literary tradition, paving the way for later poets. It is largely due to the awkwardness and weight of his style and lexicon that his influence began to wane in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and fell out of favor with nineteenth-century critics. Modern critics have reinstated Mena’s importance to Spain’s literary history and consider him to be one of the three major poets of the fifteenth century, along with Íñigo López de Mendoza and Jorge Manrique.

Read more about this topic:  Juan De Mena

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
    William James (1842–1910)

    Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, are effectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.
    Raymond Williams (1921–1988)