Francisco de Figueroa
(Alcalá de Henares, 1536- id ., 1617?) Spanish poet.He traveled through Italy and managed to assimilate the language and spirit of Italian poetry.Soldier and courtier, he carried out some diplomatic missions.Shortly before his death, he condemned his poetic work to the flames, much of which was collected by Luis Tribaldos de Toledo, who published it in Lisbon (1625).His poetry, focused mainly on love passion, draws on Petrarca and Garcilaso.He is the author of songs, elegies, glosses and sonnets, in which he reaches his most intense lyrical quality.
Francisco de Figueroa lived for some time in Rome, Bologna, Siena and, probably, Naples, where he assimilated the Italian language and culture.After intervening in various diplomatic and military missions in Italy in the service of Carlos V and Felipe II, he returned to his hometown to marry María de Vargas (1575).In 1579 he traveled to Flanders with Carlos de Aragón, 1st Duke of Terranova; He then returned to Spain and retired to his hometown to study.Figueroa maintained a relationship with other contemporary writers, such as Montesclaros, Pedro Laynez and Francisco de la Torre.Traditionally it has been included in the Salamanca or Castilian school, although it has more concomitances with the style of Garcilaso de la Vega (which he recreates since his Petrarchism) than with the poetics of Fray Luis de León.
Before dying he ordered the burning of his poetic production, although thanks to Antonio de Toledo, lord of Pozuelo, part of it (about seventy poems composed mostly before 1573) could be saved and was published in Lisboa (1625) by Luis Tribaldos de Toledo, who added to the Poems a biographical sketch of the author.Subsequently, other researchers have discovered and released new poems by Francisco de Figueroa; This is the case of R.Foulché-Delbosc (who published them in Revue Hispanique , 1911), Ramón Menéndez Pidal (in Boletín de la Real Academia Española , 1915) and Ángel Lacalle Fernández (in Revista Crítica Hispanoamericana , 1915).
In his compositions the influence of Horacio ( Cuitada navecilla , 1579), Petrarca and Garcilaso de la Vega ( Between golden flowers and Thirsi, shepherd of the most famous river ), authors with whom Figueroa was very familiar from his Italian stage.His production highlights the sonnets, in which he achieves greater formal perfection and a more intense lyrical content, and the pastoral lyres (such as Los amores de Damón y Galatea ), full of fluid and imaginative verses.He is attributed the Epitaph of Diego de Espinosa , president of the Royal Council and bishop of Sigüenza (Guadalajara).
Proof of his humanistic awareness and his concern for language problems is the letter from Chartres (France) to the scholar Ambrosio de Morales, entitled On speaking and pronouncing the Spanish language (1560, republished in Memories of the Royal Spanish Academy, 1943).Miguel de Cervantes showed his admiration for Francisco de Figueroa in La Galatea (1585) and revealed his pseudonym (Thirsi) and that of his beloved (Fili), a lady whom he supposedly met in Italy and whose love disappointed, Figueroa evoked wistfully.His contemporaries gave him the nickname El Divino , very common at the time.
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