AUSIÀS MARCH (1447)

Catalan poet whose verse greatly influenced other poets both of his own time and of the modern period.

As a young man he travelled to Sardinia and Corsica and took part in various military campaigns.

March´s verse describes the conflict between his sensuality and his passionate idealism, expressing an anguished contempt for the flesh and for his own weakness and that of his mistress Teresa Bou in yielding to it.

Except for Petrarch all the formative influences on March´s poetry and on his attitude toward life -the Provençal troubadours, Scholastic philosophy and the Italian literary movement known as dolce stil nuovo- place him as a writer of the Middle Ages rather than of the Renaissance.

Some critics considerer his apparent modernity to lie in his highly personal expression of his dilemma in starkly abstract verse which is almost devoid of imagery and uncompromising in its intellectual and metaphysical subtlety except when his probing of his own nature yields to an outburst of despair and self-loathing.

March´s poems are by convention divided into Cants d´amor and Cants de mort (respectively before and after his mistress death), Cants morals and the great Cant espiritual in which he at last attains a measure of serenity in the face of death.