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
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“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
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“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)