17th Century Spanish Literature: Baroque and Poetry
1. The 17th Century
In Spain and France, the absolute monarchy consolidated, concentrating power in the hands of the king and the court. Meanwhile, in Holland and England, the bourgeoisie grew in importance, and legislatures began to control real power. Peasant revolts and religious wars were common. The 17th century was a century of crisis: economic instability, agricultural decline, population decline, and foreign wars. The crisis affected the social structure: the bourgeoisie lost influence, while the nobility and clergy monopolized the land, leaving much of it uncultivated. Misery spread among the lower classes, who left the countryside, banditry became common, unemployment rose, and the number of beggars increased. The awareness of this acute crisis spread among writers, motivating the pessimism and disappointment typical of the Baroque.
2. The Baroque
A negative conception of the world predominated during this time, viewing it as chaos, disorder, and confusion. Life was governed by the idea of death; time destroys everything. Reality is an illusion, and the brevity of life, the decay of things, and the transience of earthly existence explain the quintessential Baroque sentiment: disappointment. Baroque pessimism presented itself in many different ways: existential angst, satire, and humor. The Baroque movement favored aesthetic contrast, light and shadow.
3. Conceptismo and Culteranismo
These two dominant stylistic trends in Spanish Baroque literature are part of a general aesthetic sensibility that seeks to impress the reader with originality. Conceptismo is based on clever associations of words or ideas and concise, content-filled language. The most used figures of speech are antithesis, paradox, hyperbole, condensation, ellipsis, and dyssemia. Writers explored the possibilities of language through the multiple meanings of words. Culteranismo prioritized formal beauty and featured exuberant ornamentation. It employed many resources: metaphors, periphrasis, hyperbole, brilliant images, and sound devices. It also used an original vocabulary, incorporating many learned words of Latin origin and selecting terms for their color and splendor.
4. Baroque Poetry
Baroque poetry experienced tremendous development, with growth not only in lyric and epic poetry but also in dramatic poetry, which gained exceptional importance. The development of printing contributed to the dissemination of poetic texts, often accompanied by engravings or illustrations. In the latter decades of the century, fewer prominent authors emerged, due to both the general decline of the country and the depletion of expressive resources. As for themes, although Culterano poets preferred classical mythology, Baroque poetry was very diverse; everything could be poetic material: love, moral reflections, existential problems, nature, and customs. The most important poets are:
4.1. Luis de Góngora
Góngora’s letrillas and other minor poems were already widely known in his day. Although sometimes serious, dealing with weighty issues, they were often humorous or satirical. With his Romances, he reached his greatest heights, alternating between the serious and the burlesque. His themes were diverse: chivalrous, Moorish, pastoral, romantic, and mythological. The Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is a very long romance that perfectly summarizes the characteristics of Góngora’s poetry, in which the most opposite traits coexist: the tendency towards Culteranismo and the popular taste for the burlesque vision of reality and thoughtful reflection. His sonnets are varied: love, burlesque, moral, mythological, and so on. The love sonnets are Petrarchan. The satirical ones incorporate elements of folk poetry. The moral ones reflect the poet’s life situation and, in a serious or mocking tone, express his personal concerns.
Polyphemus develops the classical myth of the Cyclops Polyphemus in love with the nymph Galatea. The language is very difficult. The Solitudes consist of about two thousand lines grouped in silvas; this form allows the poet greater syntactic freedom, resulting in complicated language. The theme is simple: the natural song to life, disdain for courtly ambitions. It presents a series of pastoral scenes in a stylized natural setting.
The themes of Góngora’s poetry are not novel: love, mythology, nature. However, these themes are reworked in an original and sometimes satirical way by a writer who loves life, who is refined and sensual, sharp-tongued and mocking, mindful of the beauty of the world around him or the one he creates.
4.2. The Poetry of Lope de Vega
In addition to the dramatic poetry contained in his plays, Lope de Vega also wrote epic poems and lyrical poems. In his poetry, he shows us many facets: the poet of vitality, the Petrarchan poet, the philosophical poet, the religious poet. He particularly excelled in the use of the romance and the sonnet. His romances were very famous, and he is one of the most important poets of the so-called new or artistic ballads. He collected his lyrical works in several books: Rimas, Rimas Sacras, and Rimas Humanas y Divinas del Licenciado Tomé de Burguillos. He admired the virtuosity of Culteranismo (Góngora) and, although he defended expressive clarity, he did not renounce conceptual games or formal decoration. Hence the use of paradoxes, puns, and antitheses in his poems. But at the same time, Lope is also known for his popular lyrical compositions, in which he imitated the procedures of traditional poetry: short meters, parallelisms, repetitions, and refrains.
4.3. The Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo
The themes of Quevedo’s poems are philosophical, moral, religious, amorous, satirical, and circumstantial. His serious poems, mostly sonnets, deal with typically Baroque issues. His love poetry is Petrarchan and Neoplatonic, but it is often marred by the destructive presence of death. There are also compositions in which love is discussed ironically or humorously. The satirical-burlesque poems reveal Quevedo’s wit and linguistic ingenuity. The objects of his satire are women, deceived husbands, Jews, and doctors. The central themes are the concern with death and the typical Baroque heartbreak. Death is a major concern in his poems, which reveal his horror of nothingness. His poetry is a meditation on the transience of life: time, the destroyer, can do everything, and life is a mad race towards death. As for style, it is characterized by constant puns, ellipses, double meanings, polysemy, paronomasia, and hyperbole. He mastered the language in all its registers and had a perfect knowledge of classical rhetoric. An important feature of his poetry is also its emotional intensity: Quevedo’s passion is manifested in the abundance of interrogative, exclamatory, and persuasive sentences.