Miguel de Cervantes was a poet but he didn’t know it, says historian

The Spanish author of Don Quixote thought little of his verse but a new book begs to differ.

Miguel de Cervantes is considered a mainstay of Spain’s Golden Age of baroque literature. Picture: The Times

Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, wrote that “heaven denied me the poet’s grace” and that he was “better versed in adversity than verses”.

A new book, however, seeks to prove him wrong and to show that he was not only the creator of what scholars deem to be the first modern novel but also one of the great poets of Spain’s Golden Age.

Jose Manuel Lucia Megias, the country’s foremost Cervantes biographer, argues that the writer’s poetry was overshadowed by that of the playwright Felix Lope de Vega, his great rival, even though his verses enjoyed acclaim during his life.

Playwright Félix Lope de Vega ‘dominated Spanish poetry like a king’, a professor has said. Picture: Alamy

Megias also suggests that the success of Don Quixote has shrouded his poetry, as have Cervantes’s own remarks about his lack of poetic talent, which have been taken at face value rather than with the irony that he intended.

“Lope de Vega dominated Spanish poetry like a king but at the time there were other marvellous poets and one of them was Cervantes,” Megias, a literature professor at Madrid’s Complutense University, told The Times.

“On at least two occasions Lope himself paid tribute to Cervantes’s poetry. And Don Quixote itself could only have been written by a poet.”

Academics estimate that Cervantes published more than 15,000 lyric verses, which include all forms ranging from love and elegiac to burlesque and satirical. Many appear in works such as his pastoral novel Galatea as well as Don Quixote and his compilation of short stories, Exemplary Novels.

“Like all the writers of his era, Cervantes wrote poetry. He started as a poet and finished as a poet,” said Megias. He added that the writer’s first known works are poems written in his youth and that in Journey to Parnassus, published in 1614, two years before his death, Cervantes wrote: “From my earliest years I loved the sweet art of pleasant poetry.”

Sir Francis Drake. Picture: Alamy

In 1602, before they became embroiled in a row, Lope de Vega asked Cervantes to write a laudatory sonnet for La Dragontea, an epic poem about Sir Francis Drake.

“If the king of poetry asks you for a sonnet, it’s because he thinks you are a good poet,” said Megias.

However, Cervantes’s poetic success was soon limited by his enmity with Lope de Vega, who was 15 years his junior and the creator of a new form of play that won him Spain’s theatrical crown. The cause of their rupture is unknown but in 1604 Lope de Vega said, writing of poets, that “there is none so bad as Cervantes”.

Megias said: “Lope controlled the poetic world, as well as that of the theatre, the cultural industry of the time. So what emerged was Cervantes as the king of prose, Lope the king of poetry.”

Cervantes, however, was a highly accomplished technical poet, Megias said: “He not only wrote sestinas, a 12th-century metre, which very few poets managed, but also cabo roto verses, where the last syllable is missing, which is seen at the start of Don Quixote, and was invented at that time.”

He also created a new metric form himself, a new strophe, called el Ovillejo, a 10-verse work of which seven verses were of eight syllables and three of three.

“This would have taken off if Lope had used it in his works but because of their clash he did not,” said Megias.

Megias’s book, Miguel de Cervantes. Poesia, has already persuaded some literary figures in Spain to reassess his poetry. “Cervantes’s statement about his own poetry as well as my disjointed reading of his poems, led me to a mistake that I have maintained for seven long decades,” wrote Luis Maria Anson. “But Megias has changed that. Cervantes was a notable poet.” Pablo Neruda “was undoubtedly inspired by Cervantes’s Grisostomo poem when he wrote his Canciondesesperada,” he added.

Megias concluded: “Lope paid the greatest homage to his rival in 1630 when he wrote, 15 years after Cervantes’s death, about his ‘verses of diamonds’ – what beauty, what a critique.”

The Times