Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio and the Count of Salinas: Some Reflections on the Circulation and Dating of his Poetry

Among the many uses to which Baltasar Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio can be put, not the least is what it can tell us of the circulation of poetry in the mid-seventeenth century in Spain, and this is a use which, I suspect, may have been underexploited or little valued. To a large extent, the Agudeza y arte de ingenio is a type of poetic anthology, a treasure store of quotations from Spanish poetry from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, an indicator of what poetry was available to Gracián at that time, and possibly also a barometer of taste. In many instances it is possible to determine with a good degree of accuracy exactly which texts Gracián was using and citing from, especially if, in the case of printed works, there was only one edition he could have used. It would help if we had knowledge of which books and manuscripts Gracián owned, which ones he could take down from his own shelves whenever he required an apt quotation; but even so, they would not have been his only source of knowledge as he would also have had access to books in the possession of friends, such as the Aragonese literary patron and bibliophile Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, whose house Gracián visited frequently while he was a preacher and confessor in Huesca during the late 1630s. During the period (mid to late 1640s), when he was finalizing the second version of the Agudeza y arte de ingenio¹ Gracián was in Valencia, recuperating from an illness he contracted during the Catalan campaign, where, as Vice-Rector of the Jesuit College in Tarragona, he had offered spiritual succour to the soldiers who had taken part in the siege of Lérida. In Valencia he had access to the hospital's magnificent library and he used the time there to prepare a new work, El discreto (1646), before returning to Huesca and the comforts of Lastanosa's house and library. This period saw the writing and publication of the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647) and the definitive version of Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648). Finally, during his many travels between Aragón, Madrid, Valencia and Tarragona, Gracián would have had at his disposal the rich collections of the Jesuit seminaries where he stayed. As it happens, a number of his books can still be found in the library of the Real Seminario de San Carlos in Zaragoza, among them a copy of the Rimas (Zaragoza, 1634) of Bartolomé and Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, with his ex libris, 'de gracian', written in ink opposite the title page. Notwithstanding the lack of a list of books and manuscripts owned by Gracián, the Agudeza y arte de ingenio itself offers perhaps the most accurate record of his reading and knowledge of Spanish poetry from fifteenth-century cancionero verse to the late Gongoristic poetry in vogue in the 1640s.

The poetry of Diego de Silva y Mendoza, Count of Salinas and Marquis of Alenquer (to give him the titles by which as a poet he is most often cited), is quoted directly only twice in Gracián's compendium,² and both quotes come from the redondillas 'A la esperanza', which Gracián almost certainly encountered in the anthology Primera parte de las flores de poetas ilustres de España, put together by Pedro de Espinosa and published in Valladolid by Luis Sánchez in 1605, a period when Salinas was resident in the new capital. There is no reason to believe that Gracián knew any more poems of Salinas than the very few to be found in printed anthologies such as Espinosa's Flores. There was no printed edition of his work and his poetry circulated primarily in manuscript – and even then in a quite restricted circle.³ Had Gracián known the rest of Salinas's poetry, however – some 100 to 115 poems of certain authenticity – it...