MANRIQUE, JORGE. - Spanish poet, b. at Paredes de Nava ca. 1440, d. of wounds in the assault on the castle of Garci-Muñoz in 1479. Lord of Belmontojo and a man-at-arms, he served with valor under the banners of Isabella the Catholic.
Of his brief Cancionero (modern ed. by A. Cortina, in Clásicos castellanos, XCIV, Madrid 1929), famous is the elegy in 40 stanzas entitled Coplas a la muerte del maestro de Santiago don Rodrigo Manrique, su padre. In it, projecting the transience of earthly goods onto the immutability of the eternal, M. teaches the conquest of the latter through contempt for the former, subject as they are to the dominion of death, inexorable not only against kings, but also against the brave and the pious, as Rodrigo was. His acceptance of death assumes, in the moving evocation by the son, a universal and exemplary value of man's conformity to the divine will. The coplas, deemed by Lope de Vega worthy of being written in letters of gold, often translated abroad (among others, by Longfellow in 1833), imitated and commented upon, derive their concepts and turns especially from the Bible, from Boethius and from Prosper of Aquitaine (the derivation from the elegy of the dames du temps jadis of Villon is only apparent); but, as the original and moving expression of a heart in anguish, they are the song of human sorrow, a stimulus to trustful resignation and, in the realm of art, «a perfect and sublime work in universal lyric poetry» (A. Valbuena Prat).
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Enzo Navarra