Manrique, Jorge (c. 1440-1479)

Spanish Castilian poet and soldier. Only 49 poems are attributed with any certainty to Manrique. His most acclaimed work, Coplas que fizo por la muerte de su padre/Verses Composed on the Death of His Father (1476), is a sublime meditation on the transience of life, inevitability of death, and consolation of belief in salvation through Jesus, written on the death of his father.

Although Manrique was well known as a poet in his lifetime, his Coplas was first published about 1490 in the Cancionero de Ramón Llavia. A selection of his other poetry appeared in four successive editions of the Cancionero General (first edition 1511), the Coplas being added in Juan Cromberger's 1535 edition. Juan de Valdés praised the form and content of the Coplas, which was set to music in 1557 and became the subject of numerous glosses, the first of these being Alonso de Cervantes's Glosa famosísima/Most famous gloss (1501). Henry Longfellow translated Coplas into English in 1833.

Manrique came from a powerful noble family. His father was Master of the Order of Santiago (1474), his uncle was the poet Gómez Manrique Jorge Manrique who died in a skirmish against supporters of the royal pretender, Juana ‘la Beltraneja’.