Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco Gómez de
Quevedo y Villegas, (b.
Sept. 17, 1580, Madrid,
Spain—d. Sept. 8, 1645,
Villanueva de los Infantes),
poet and master satirist of
Spain’s Golden Age, who, as
a virtuoso of language, is
unequaled in Spanish
literature.
Quevedo was born to a
family of wealth and
distinction. He studied at
the universities of Alcalá
and Valladolid from 1596 to
1606, was versed in several
languages, and by the age of
23 had distinguished himself
as a poet and wit. His elder
contemporaries, Miguel de
Cervantes and Lope de Vega,
both expressed their esteem
for his poetry, but Quevedo
was more interested in a
political career. In 1613 he
became a counsellor to the
Duke de Osuna, viceroy of
Sicily and later of Naples,
whom he served with
distinction for seven years.
On the ascension of Philip
IV of Spain, Osuna fell from
favour and Quevedo was
placed under house arrest.
He thereafter refused
political appointment and
devoted himself to writing,
producing a steady stream of
satirical verse and prose
aimed at the follies of his
contemporaries. In 1639 he
was again arrested,
supposedly for a satirical
poem, and was confined in a
monastery. Released in 1643,
broken in health, he died
shortly after.
Quevedo reveals his
complex personality in the
extreme variety of tone in
his works, ranging from the
obscene to the devout. His
learning and wide culture
impelled him to write works
of high moral seriousness,
treatises on Stoic
philosophy, and translations
of Epictetus and Seneca, but
he demonstrates equal
familiarity with low life
and the cant of the
underworld.
The bulk of his satirical
writings were aimed at
specific abuses of the day
and are no longer of
interest, but he is
remembered for his
picaresque novel La vida del
buscón (1626; “The Life of a
Scoundrel”), which describes
the adventures of “Paul the
Sharper” in a grotesquely
distorted world of thieves,
connivers, and impostors.
Quevedo’s Sueños (1627;
Dreams), fantasies of hell
and death, written at
intervals from 1606 to 1622,
shows his development as a
master of the then new
Baroque style conceptismo, a
complicated form of
expression depending on puns
and elaborate conceits. An
anthology of his poems in
English translation was
published in 1969.
