Spanish · 1440–1479
Manrique was a soldier from a great Castilian military family, a commander in the Order of Santiago, and fought for Isabella against the supporters of Juana la Beltraneja. He wrote about fifty courtly love poems that nobody would remember, and then, when his father Don Rodrigo died in 1476, an elegy in forty stanzas that became the most famous poem in Spanish. He died three years later at thirty-nine, wounded in a skirmish outside a castle at Garcimuñoz, with verses reportedly found in his breastplate. Longfellow translated the Coplas into English in 1833. Every Spanish-speaking child learns its opening lines about rivers going down to the sea, and its metre — the pie quebrado, a broken foot that cuts every third line short — has been imitated so often that the stanza is named after him.