Introduction: ‘Nada menos que … toda una literatura’

Francisco de Quevedo's remarkable love poetry has finally begun to speak to us on its own terms: as poetry. For too long its voice struggled to be heard under the considerable weight of alternative critical displacement activity; that is, engagement with the still unresolved issues of chronology, dating, and corpus definition that are inevitably dominant when a poet does not publish his work in his own lifetime. However, there are some things that we do know for certain: the first posthumous edition of Quevedo's poetry was compiled and edited by his friend, José Antonio González de Salas, in 1648, under the title El Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, con las nueve Musas castellanas [The Spanish Parnassus, a mountain divided into two summits, with nine Castilian Muses]; six ‘Muses’ were completed before Salas's death and the task of editing the remaining three fell to Quevedo's nephew, Pedro Aldrete Quevedo. Las tres Musas últimas [The final three Muses], a work of more dubious scholarship, was published over two decades later, in 1670. The love poetry, totalling more than 200 poems in Blecua's canonical edition (if we eliminate some of doubtful attribution), appeared originally in Salas's Muse Erato and in Aldrete's Euterpe. Salas divided the 132 love poems of the Muse Erato into two sections: the first, Poesías a varios sujetos, contains poems that are either addressed to women with conventional names (Aminta, Amarylis, Flora, Floralba), some simply to ‘una dama’, others to no-one at all; the second section, Poesías singularmente a un sujeto, contains a mini-anthology addressed either to Lisi or, again, not specified.