Las visiones de Petrarca en la poesía hispánica y en la poética renacentista

In Spain as in Spanish America in the Golden Age, imitatio held sway as the dominant poetics. Yet the concept of imitatio is an elastic one. How can a twenty-first century reader grasp the meaning of Renaissance imitatio? As a means of addressing this question, this essay analyzes the relationship of important poems to their source text, foregrounding Bartolomeo Ricci’s concepts of sequi, imitare, and aemulare, presented in the 1541 De imitatione. Focusing on the rich legacies of Canzone 323 (delle Visioni) by Francesco Petrarca in the poetry of (among others) Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Francisco de Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Fray Luís de León and Juan de Guevara, the essay provides a powerful explication of the generative properties of imitatio. [This article published in the author's original Spanish.