biography
pronunciation:
[march]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (c.1397–1459)
|
| biography:
| The first major poet to write exclusively in Catalan, and one of the greatest poets in that language, born in Gandia, Valencia, E Spain. The son of Pere March, whose family was raised to the nobility in 1360, from 1418 he fought under Alfonso V of Aragón in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Djerba, but c.1425 he abandoned his military career to manage the royal falconry at Albafuera. In 1347 he married Isabel, the sister of Joanot Martorell, but she died in 1439 and four years later he married Joana Scorna. Joana died in 1454 and it may be her death that is reflected in some of his best poems, Cants de mort XCII–XCVII. March was influenced by Thomist and other scholastic philosophy, by the Provençal troubadours (particularly by Arnaut Daniel), and by Dante and Petrarch. In Spain his influence was immediate and durable, pervading the work of Garcilaso, Cetina, Montemayor, and Herrera. March wrote 128 identified surviving poems, of which three quarters deal with some aspect of love, and derive generically from Provençal tradition. But by using Catalan as his medium he removed his poetry from the conventional courtly genre and created a new and individual role as introvert and moralist. Most of his poems are addressed to a married woman, who has been identified as Teresa Bou. A writer of dramatically concentrated expressiveness, his strength is in the intellect, rather than the imagination. His images, commonly described in the first person, are those of a sailor endangered by storms, of a sick man on his deathbed, or of a prisoner in a cell. Formally, he usually adhered to the rules of versification drawn up by the Catalan troubadour Ramon Vidal c.1200: his metres are the Provençal hendecasyllable with a caesura after the fourth syllable; and the octaves of coblas croadas (‘crossed rhymes’), and coblas encadenadas (‘linked rhymes’). |
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