ABSTRACT
The wholesale neglect of eighteenth-century Spanish epic poetry in current Hispanic scholarship stands in dichotomous relation to the pre-eminence enjoyed by the genre during the eighteenth century. Jovellanos’ description of the genre as ‘el más noble de todo’ 1 is reinforced by Francisco Sánchez Barbero’s claim that it was ‘el poema por excelencia; la obra más grande del genio’. 2 Similarly, Manuel José Quintana in his essay Sobre la poesía épica castellana (1833) holds the genre up as ‘el blasón principal de su literatura’, and champions it as a ‘joya de tan inestimable precio’. 3 It was precisely this celebration of the sublime status of the epic which led to the proliferation of national and public poems during the eighteenth century: ‘se ponen de moda y consiguen una gran popularidad en toda Europa’. 4 The epic genre, both practised and discussed, became the source of intense interest and debate in Enlightenment Europe. Frank Pierce regards the eighteenth century as signalling the beginning of a more systematic treatment of the epic genre. He cites Voltaire’s Essai sur la poésie épique (1726) as instrumental in this process, describing it as the impetus behind subsequent Spanish studies of the genre, 5 most notably Ignacio de Luzán’s analysis of the epic form in Book IV of his Poética (1737). 6 In fact, it was Voltaire’s study of Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1589) which did much to promote eighteenth-century interest in Ercilla’s poem; 7 Frank Pierce draws attention to two well-known Spanish editions of Ercilla’s poem that were made in 1733 and 1776. 8
