Agudeza y arte de ingenio; Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1669)

What it is about

Two works of Gracián in one volume: Wit and the Art of Ingenuity, a theory of metaphor and of the conceit, and the Pocket Oracle, three hundred maxims on how to move among people.

Context and history

The Agudeza is where Spanish conceptismo defends itself: it argues that difficulty is not a fault of style but the way wit says what would otherwise go unsaid. The Oracle is drier and has travelled further: Schopenhauer translated it into German and thought it a book to be reread all one's life. Both share a cold distrust of other people's intentions that was new at the time.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.