Spanish · 1580–1645
Quevedo was born in the royal palace, where his parents served the queen, and was short-sighted and club-footed, facts his enemies never let him forget. He took degrees in theology, served the Duke of Osuna in Naples and Sicily on missions that involved forged documents and an alleged plot against Venice, was exiled twice, and in 1639 was arrested — a satire against the royal favourite Olivares was found under the king's napkin — and held for four years in a damp cell at San Marcos de León, from which he emerged broken. He conducted a lifelong feud with Góngora in verse of astonishing viciousness. His sonnets on death, time and love are the hardest and most compressed in Spanish; his prose invented a mode of grotesque satire, conceptismo, that packs a pun and a moral into every clause.