Esteban Manuel de Villegas

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Esteban Manuel de Villegas (born Matute, La Rioja on 5 February 1589; died Nájera, La Rioja on 3 September 1669) was a 17th century Spanish poet.

[edit] Biography

Villegas studied in Madrid and enrolled at the University of Salamanca on 20 November 1610. He was treasurer of royal income in Nájera, not obtaining any of the positions he wanted. In spite of coming from a family in comfortable circumstances and which had sources of income, his entire life was spent in difficult financial hardships because of its crowd of children and was continually involved in litigation. At the age of 36, he married Doña Antonia de Leyva Villodas, twenty years younger than he. In 1659 he was processed by the Inquisition of which had Logroño, on everything, to its gigantic vanity, that made be believed him in possession of the absolute truth and by above of the others. Defendant was jailed to him of to have said that free will knew more of thorny questions like the Church Fathers, and of to have written satires against religious communities. By this cause many of their papers are had lost that Inquisition confiscated. The sentence condemned him to four years of exile in Santa Maria de Ribarredonda, but he obtained a pardon to the year, and died at the age of 84 in Nájera.

[edit] 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), whose cover, which bore under a rising sun the motto "Me surgente, quid istae?", earned him more than a few enemies because of his excessive pride. The author tried to suppress the emblem of the copies that he could.

The book has two parts; the first is written in heptasyllables and is of anacreontic subject; the second is in endecasyllables and is of historical subject. It contained very delicate poems in short meters, which he managed with special skill. It contains a book of odes, very free translations of Horace, elegies, idylls, epigrams and some sonnets. It handles the syllables quantitatively and it uses Sapphic, adonic, and anacreontic meters, et cetera, instead of the forms then current in Spanish. For that reason their poetry is purely formal, a slave to attitude. For that reason [ Neoclasicismo was constituted in the great precedent of the 19th century. In long verses a strong air notices culterano, like for example in "Oda a Felipe III" (Ode to Philip III). His intention to introduce metric the quantitative one to only it left or the introduction him of the adónicos sáficos, since these are lent very or to a class of endecasílabos:

Dulce vecino de la verde selva,

huésped eterno del abril florido,

vital aliento de la madre Venus,

céfiro blando.

Also its intention knew fortune to acclimate in sort of anacreontics in Spanish poetry, because during the 18th century it had east lírico subgenus special cultivators in the form of Villegas, specially Juan Meléndez Valdés and José Iglesias de la Casa. Also very his were imitated "Cantilenas" of pastoral subjects and full rates of grace. Already of advanced age, he translated Boethius' "De consolatione Philosophiae" and, learned lesson by his collision with Santo Oficio, left in Latin the part corresponding to the free will. He wrote in addition two volumes to "Disertaciones" in which it commented classic the old ones and they are had lost. Its sign loses in the 18th century into the hands of father Martín Sarmiento. In addition it composed "Discurso contra las comedias" or "Antiteatro" that was never published.