ABSTRACT
Along with Lope de Vega and Luis de Gongora, Quevedo was a prolific conceptual poet, satirist, moralist, and novelist whose oeuvre defined the so-called Golden Age of Spanish letters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an age that, needless to say, was "golden" as a result of the abuses the Iberians engaged in on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Quevedo left us with memorable sonnets and dream sequences. He also wrote the picaresque novel El buscón (1626), available in English as The Swindler, and published El caballero de la tenaza (The Stolid Knight, 1606), La hora de todos y la fortuna con seso (Everyone's Hour and Intelligent Fortune, 1645), as well as a series of five Sueños (Dreams, 1607 to 1621—1622), visions in which, cynically, he imagined hell, death, and the world upside down. A stern xenophobe, Quevedo authored "The Nose" (in Spanish, "Erase un hontbre a una naríz pegado..."), which might be one of the most anti-Semitic sonnets ever written in Spain, a peninsula known for its anti-Jewish literature. Among modern literati, Quevedo exercised influence over Borges and Octavio Paz.
