Francisco de la Torre (poet)

Francisco de la Torre (c.1534 – c.1594) was a Spanish poet of the later phase of the Renaissance, associated with the Salamanca School. He should not be confused with the poet of the same name from the early seventeenth century.

Almost nothing is known about his life, making him perhaps the most mysterious poet of the sixteenth century.^[1] His biography is mostly conjectural, based on hints from his verses, as outlined by Aureliano Fernández-Guerra in his inaugural speech at the Royal Spanish Academy in 1857. According to Fernández-Guerra, Torre was born in Torrelaguna around 1534, studied at Alcalá de Henares, pursued a military career in Italy, and later became a cleric.

A manuscript^[2] of his poems circulated in the early seventeenth century with an Approval by Alonso de Ercilla, who died in 1594, and caught the attention of Francisco de Quevedo, who purchased it and published it alongside works by Fray Luis de León in 1631 to provide exemplary classical poetry against the excesses of Culteranismo. Quevedo tried to investigate the author of the manuscript, which the bookseller sold him disdainfully, but could not uncover anything; moreover, the author's name was "erased in five places with such care that smoke was added to the ink." When José Luis Velázquez reprinted Torre's works in Madrid in 1753, he thought the author might actually be Quevedo himself, a theory unanimously rejected by modern scholarship since Manuel José Quintana in the nineteenth century.

Torre's works have been edited in modern times by Alonso Zamora Vicente in the Clásicos Castellanos series in 1944, and other notable editions followed, such as María Luisa Cerrón Puga's 1984 edition from Ediciones Cátedra, which notes Italian sources. In a recent essay, Antonio Alatorre posits, without providing new biographical details, that "Francisco de la Torre was born in the mid-sixteenth century in Santa Fe de Bogotá, where he appears to have spent his entire life."

Heavily influenced by Petrarchism,^[3] some of his poems are translations of Italian writers, especially Benedetto Varchi, and his songbook revolves around a figure named Filis, who upon the lover's return from Italy is found married to another. His models include Garcilaso de la Vega and Horace, within a worldview immersed in Neoplatonism, yet he is distinguished by his refined sensitivity to themes such as night, the solitary dove, and the pain of the absent beloved. In Torre, Garcilasian existential melancholy is purified and refined almost to a pre-romantic degree; like the Toledan poet, his attitude is extremely paganising.

His oeuvre is divided into three books: First and Second Books of Lyric Verses, featuring sonnets of exceptional formal perfection and emotion, including those dedicated To the Night and pastoral themes, and Third Book of Adonic Verses, as well as eight eclogues collected under the title Bucólica del Tajo.

His Songs are well regarded, especially To the Dove and To the Wounded Deer. He also contributed to Spanish metrics with the so-called La Torre stanza or Adonic Sapphic, likely the first to cultivate it, and wrote laments in heptasyllables and hexasyllables:

In a 1999 essay published in the Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Mexican philologist Antonio Alatorre suggested that Francisco de la Torre may have been of New Granadian origin, specifically from Bogotá, now Colombia.^[4]

This hypothesis builds on a reinterpretation of the intuition proposed by Bartolomé José Gallardo in the nineteenth century. Gallardo, upon discovering a sonnet signed by the "Licenciado Francisco de la Torre Escobar, native of Santa Fe of the New Kingdom of Granada" in the preliminaries of Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599) by Captain Bernardo Vargas Machuca, suggested in parentheses that he could be "perhaps the true author of the poems some attribute to D. Francisco de Quevedo". Alatorre translates this intuition into the claim that Torre's lack of documentary traces in Spain could be explained if he were "a Bogotan who never resided in Spain and therefore left no documentary trace," resolving the long-standing enigma surrounding the poet's identity.^[5]

Alatorre reinforces his argument with his teaching experience in the "Seminar on Golden Age Poetry" at the National University, where close reading revealed a poetic singularity that he attributes to Torre being an avis rara in the Iberian literary scene. According to Alatorre, Torre's distinctive traits —"his refined vocabulary, exquisite craftsmanship, lyrical intensity, tenderness, melancholy"— are explained by a "solitary figure who, in the still-developing Bogotá of the late sixteenth century, gave free rein to his very personal feelings and imaginations." This interpretation not only clarifies the poet's stylistic originality but is also supported by historical evidence of active book trade facilitating access to Spanish and Italian works in the New World, as seen in Torre's translations and adaptations of Tuscan sonnets, showing that an American poet could draw on the same literary sources circulating in Spain.^[6]

Despite the documentation presented by the philologist, the academic community has received this theory with scepticism.^[7]

• Alatorre, Antonio. "Francisco de la Torre y su muy probable patria: Santa Fe de Bogotá". Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica Vol. 47, No. 1 (1999), 33–72.
• Blanco Sánchez, Antonio, Entre fray Luis y Quevedo: In Search of Francisco de la Torre. Menéndez Pidal Prize, Royal Spanish Academy, 1980. Salamanca: Atlas, 1982.
• Cerrón Puga, María Luisa, The Lost Poet: An Approach to Francisco de la Torre. Pisa: Giardini, 1984.
• Fernández Rodríguez, Amelia. "On Thematic Construction in Francisco de la Torre’s Love Sonnets." Boletín del Departamento de Literatura Española, 57–74, 1989.
• García García, Jordi. "The Rhetoric of Fate in Francisco de la Torre." Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo, 65:71–96, 1989.
• Hughes, Gethin J. "Versos Bimembres and Parallelism in the Poetry of Francisco de la Torre." Hispanic Review, 43:381–392, 1975.
• Hughes, Gethin, The Poetry of Francisco de la Torre. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
• Komanecky, Peter M. "Quevedo's Notes on Herrera: The Involvement of Francisco de La Torre in the Controversy over Gongora." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 52:123–133, 1975.
• Pérez-Abadín Barro, Soledad. "The Influence of Bernardo Tasso on Francisco de la Torre." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 73(1):13–18, 1996.
• Spanish Lyric Poets: Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, St. John of the Cross, Francisco de la Torre, Fernando de Herrera. Buenos Aires: Editorial El Ateneo, 1959.
• Torre, Francisco de la, Poesías. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969; 1944.
• Torre, Francisco de la, Complete Poetry. Madrid: Cátedra, 1984.

• Portal I dedicated to the life and works of Francisco de la Torre, with an anthology of his verses
• Portal II dedicated to the life and works of Francisco de la Torre, with an anthology of his verses
• Some poems by Francisco de la Torre
• Poems by Francisco de la Torre