Juan Boscán Almogáver

Juan Boscán, original name Joan Boscà
I Almogàver (b. c. 1490, Barcelona,
Aragon [Spain]—d. Sept. 21, 1542,
Barcelona), Catalan poet who wrote
exclusively in Castilian and adapted the
Italian hendecasyllable to that
language.
Though a minor poet, Boscán is of
major historical importance because of
his naturalizing of Italian metres and
verse forms, an experiment that induced
one of the greatest of all Spanish
poets, Boscán’s younger friend Garcilaso
de la Vega, to follow his example. Their
works appeared together posthumously in
1543, and the tide of Petrarchianism
dominated over Spanish poetry for the
next century and a half.
Boscán had published in 1534 a
translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s
Il cortegiano (The Courtier). His prose
was greatly superior to his verse, and
El Cortesano is not only one of the
influential books of the Spanish
Renaissance but a work of art in its own
right.