Wit and the Art of Ingenuity

About this book

Baltasar Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648) is the fullest treatise of the Baroque theory of the conceit — conceptismo — and at once an anthology and a taxonomy of wit. In more than fifty discourses the Spanish Jesuit and author of The Critic and The Pocket Oracle reduces every form of cleverness to a single art, and illustrates it with the finest conceits of classical and Spanish letters, from Virgil and Martial to Góngora, Garcilaso and Quevedo. The sharpness of the mind is dissected as nowhere else: the conceit by correspondence and proportion, by disparity and dissonance, in pun and paradox, enigma and epigram, jest and judgment. This Octant Press edition presents the first complete English translation of the Huesca text of 1648, with the quoted verse rendered into English.