Ausias March
Valencian poet and knight (c. 1400–1459), born in Gandia into a noble family with both a military and a literary tradition —his father, Pere March, was also a poet— and trained in arms, taking part in military expeditions to Sardinia and North Africa under the Crown of Aragon before retiring to his estates to manage his properties, live an emotionally turbulent life partly documented by his own poetry, and, above all, devote himself to writing verse. Regarded as the most important poet of medieval Catalan literature and one of the great European lyric poets of the fifteenth century, Ausiàs March broke radically with the Provençal troubadour tradition that still dominated Catalan poetry of his time, abandoning Occitan as the language of poetry —until then obligatory for cultivated lyric verse— to write entirely in Catalan, and replacing the conventional idealisation of courtly love with a profound and often tortured psychological introspection, rooted in Aristotelian and scholastic thought, that explores without compromise the conflicts between reason and passion, body and soul, desire and guilt. His work, transmitted in some 128 poems traditionally grouped into thematic cycles (love songs, death songs, a moral song, a spiritual song, and the famous Song of Death), is marked by dense, syntactically complex language laden with paradoxes, in which love often becomes a source of suffering and of painful self-knowledge rather than of pleasure, and where the death of his beloved appears as an obsessive, recurring theme. March's influence on Castilian poetry of the Golden Age, particularly on Garcilaso de la Vega, who read and directly imitated him, was decisive, and his work has been championed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially since the Renaixença and Noucentisme movements, as one of the absolute peaks of Catalan literature of all time.