JUAN DE MENA. - Spanish poet, b. at Córdoba in 1411, d. at Torrelaguna in 1456. He studied for a time in Rome, where he became initiated into humanistic culture; on his return to his native land he was appointed chronicler and secretary for Latin letters by King Juan II.
He fell under the spell of Dante’s *Divine Comedy*, from which, as well as from the *Aeneid* and the *Pharsalia*, he derived inspiration for his allegorical poem in dodecasyllabic octaves, *El laberinto de Fortuna*: a journey to the “great beyond,” where, guided by Providence in the guise of a beautiful woman, the poet beholds the “máquina mundana,” composed of wheels and circles named after the planets and peopled with spirits. Like Dante, Mena also pursued the tendency to reconnect with earthly life through episodes drawn from legend or history, which constitute the most artistically felicitous section of the weighty work and the first attempt at a celebration of the national vicissitudes. Less valid is the unfinished sermon left as *Cœlus contra los pecados mortales*; yet all of Mena’s work, with its vigorously personal style, often becomes encumbered with hyperbata and exoticisms, only clarifying in zones of attained poetry.