1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/March, Auzias

MARCH, AUZIAS (c. 1395–1458), Catalan poet, was born at Valencia towards the end of the 14th century. Little is known of his career except that he was twice married—first to Na Ysabel Martorell, and second to Na Johanna Scorna—that he died on the 4th of November 1458, and that he left several natural children. Inheriting an easy fortune from his father, the treasurer to the duke of Gandia, and enjoying the powerful patronage of Prince Carlos de Viana of Aragon, March was enabled to devote himself to poetical composition. He is an undisguised follower of Petrarch, carrying the imitation to such a point that he addresses his Cants d’amor to a lady whom he professes to have seen first in church on Good Friday; so far as the difference of language allows, he reproduces the rhythmical cadences of his model, and in the Cants de mort touches a note of brooding sentiment peculiar to himself. Though his poems are disfigured by obscurity and a monotonous morbidity, he was fully entitled to the supremacy which he enjoyed among his contemporaries, and the success of his innovation no doubt encouraged Boscán to introduce the Italian metres into Castilian.

His verses were first printed in Catalan in 1543, but they had already become known through the Castilian translation published by Baltasar de Romani in 1539.