Manuel José Quintana
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Portrait by José Ribelles (1806)
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| Born | Manuel José Quintana y Lorenzo April 11, 1772 Madrid |
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| Nationality | Spanish |
Manuel José Quintana y Lorenzo (11 April 1772 – 11 March 1857), was a Spanish poet and man of letters.
Contents
Life
Manuel José Quintana was born at Madrid. He studied first letters in Madrid and then latinity in Cordoba with Manuel de Salas. He then returned to Madrid, where on July 14, 1787 he recited an ode at the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Quintana went on to study law in Salamanca, where he got along very well with the liberal rector Diego Muñoz-Torrero, but not with his successor, Francisco Tejerizo, who expelled him in 1793, although he was readmitted the following year. His Salamanca teachers, in law and poetry, were the neoclassical Juan Meléndez Valdés, Pedro Estala, Nicasio Álvarez de Cienfuegos and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos.
After completing his studies at Salamanca he was called to the bar. In the same year he was appointed fiscal procurator of the Board of Trade and Currency. Until 1798 he wrote a series of odes that, printed later (Poesías, 1802), would make him famous. However, his brief marriage in 1800 with the beautiful lady from Zaragoza María Antonia Florencia ended in failure, they separated and had no children; she died in 1820. In 1801 Quintana produced a tragedy, El Duque de Viseo, founded on M. G. Lewis's Castle Spectre; his Pelayo (1805), written on a patriotic theme, was more successful.[1]
During the War of Independence and from 1808 he was a militant on the liberal side and held various political positions in the anti-Bonapartist resistance, earning a well-deserved reputation as a patriot especially for his direction of the Semanario Patriótico, an idea that came from the famous gathering at his home in Madrid; printed at first in Madrid, this periodical then moved to Seville and then to the besieged Cádiz.
In 1808 he also published España libre and Poesías patrióticas. From then on his work of pure literary creation was marginalized as he put his pen to the service of his multiple political commitments of liberal orientation, since he was first officer of the General Secretariat of the Central Junta since January 1809, of which Martín de Garay was the head. With him, Lorenzo Calvo de Rozas and other members of the Central Junta who had been born in the 70's of the 18th century, he worked out a plan to impose their liberal ideas against the absolutists and even against people like Jovellanos, with whom they sometimes condescended despite the fact that they did not share his defense of the traditional laws. But the impulse of Quintana and Garay allowed the Cortes of Cádiz to meet in a single chamber without respecting the privileged classes.
In January 1810, he was appointed Secretary of Interpretation of Languages and also participated in the Board of Public Instruction. In September 1813, together with Martín González de Navas, José de Vargas Ponce, Eugenio de Tapia, Diego Clemencín and Ramón Gil de la Cuadra, he signs the so-called Quintana Report in Cádiz, whose purpose is to propose improvements for public instruction. Also in 1813, he published another collection of Poetry. In 1814, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy and the Academy of San Fernando, but that same year, when Ferdinand VII returned from France and because of the involution provoked by The Persians' Manifesto, he was imprisoned in Pamplona from 1814 to 1820 for his collaboration with the Cortes of Cádiz.
He was released when the constitutional government was reestablished in 1820; he joined the Society of the Ring and presided over it from November 30, 1821; in the same year he was elected to the Cortes and appointed president of the General Directorate of Studies, for which he would write a Report in 1822; In 1823, after the Constitution was again abolished, he was again stripped of all his offices and honors and until 1828, when he was allowed to return to Madrid, he lived in Extremadura with his paternal family; there he wrote his famous Letters to Lord Holland, published only in his Complete Works of 1852.
When the monarch died, he was reinstated in his posts and appointed prócer of the Kingdom (1834–1836), director of Studies again in 1835 and senator-elect for Badajoz, sworn in 1837.1 In 1830 he had begun to edit an anthology of classical Spanish poets prepared by him with important prologues and notes, Poesías selectas castellanas, whose third volume, Musa épica, appeared in 1833; it was the fruit of his past philological work with Pedro Estala. The first is devoted to the classics, the second to 18th century poetry and the third to heroic or narrative poetry.
He was finally given a small post in the civil service, became tutor to Queen Isabella II, and was nominated senator. On March 25, 1855 he was laureate as national poet by Queen Isabella, a solemn act that was celebrated in the Senate. The ceremony was organized by a commission formed by the journalists Pedro Calvo Asensio (director of La Iberia), José Rúa Figueroa (director of La Nación), Alejo Galilea (director of El Tribuno), Francisco Orgaz (director of El Esparterista), Alfonso García Tejero (director of El Miliciano), Enrique Cisneros (director of La Unión Liberal) and Vicente Barrantes (editor of Las Novedades), who would be joined by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch and Joaquín Marracci. The program, speeches and eulogies were printed in a publication delivered at the event itself, with texts by the poets Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Rosa Butler and the journalists Juan de la Rosa González and Manuel del Llano y Persi, among others. The solemnity of the event was reflected in a painting by Luis López Piquer which, beyond the event itself, portrays the remarkable group of Spanish writers, journalists, poets and politicians of the mid-19th century, whose faces, in many cases, are clearly recognizable.
He died two years later at number one of the Puerta del Sol and, because of his frugal way of life, he left some debts that were satisfied with the sale of books from his library, the purchase of which was the only vice attributed to him. The burial was paid for entirely by the Queen.
Quintana's poetry is almost all of civic, moral, patriotic or political themes, of fundamentally neoclassical inspiration, but it approaches Pre-romanticism in some moments, as in his poem dedicated to the sea. Among his defects is the excessively declamatory tone of his verses and the abundance of epithets, an evil that he contributed to prolong among his unfortunate imitators.
Notes
References
- Blanco Sánchez, Rufino (1910). Quintana: Sus Ideas Pedagógicas, su Política y su Significación Filosófica. Madrid: Imp. de la Revista de Archivos.
- Dérozier, Albert (1964). "Les Étapes de la Vie Officielle de Manuel Josef Quintana," Bulletin Hispanique, Vol. LXVI, pp. 363–83.
- Dérozier, Albert (1968–70). Manuel Josef Quintana et la naissance du libéralisme en Espagne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
- Martínez Torrón, Diego (1995). Manuel José Quintana y el Espíritu de la España Liberal. Sevilla: Ed. Alfar.
- Mérimée, Ernest (1902). "Les Poésies Liriques de Quintana," Bulletin Hispanique, Vol. IV, pp. 119–53.
- Valero, José A. (2003). "Manuel José Quintana y el Sublime Moral," Hispanic Review, Vol. LXXI, pp. 585–611.
- Valero, José A. (2013). Contagio Sublime. Manuel José Quintana y el Republicanismo Clásico. Madrid: Ediciones del Orto/Universidad de Minnesota.
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Manuel José Quintana. |
- Works by Manuel José Quintana at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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- 1772 births
- 1857 deaths
- 19th-century male writers
- 19th-century Spanish poets
- Burials at Cementerio de la Almudena
- Members of the Royal Spanish Academy
- Spanish male poets
- University of Salamanca alumni
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