Baroque Literary Style: Characteristics and Techniques
Baroque Literary Style: An Artistic Intensification
Baroque style is often characterized by exaggerated elements. Following the Renaissance aesthetic and the death of Felipe II, his son, Felipe III, succeeded him. With him began an unstoppable political, economic, and military decline that worsened throughout the century. The inheritance of his son, Carlos II, resulted in the War of Succession in 1700, in which two factions divided Spain, which was about to lose its political unity. This period was not a friend of literature. After the death of Calderón de la Barca, the second part of the Golden Age lived on with an unusual flourishing of the novel and poetry, but with a crisis in theater. Spanish literature of this time says “no” through an era of dominance of sentiments like disillusionment, pessimism, and anguish.
Aesthetic Trends of the Baroque
This period is marked by the desire for originality through exaggeration, wit, and a fondness for artificiality. It is also characterized by contrasts between beauty and ugliness, refinement and vulgarity, and life and death. These characteristics of Baroque aesthetics are embodied in two trends:
- Conceptism: This trend focuses on the sharpness of wit in the concept. Among its rhetorical mechanisms, metaphors, images, and similes stand out. Quevedo offered a dehumanized and denigrating vision of reality. Word games with double meanings and equivocations abound.
- Culteranism: This trend sought to create great cultured ornamentation in poetic language, moving away from everyday language. It is characterized by the expressive use of Latinate words and frequent mythological allusions.
Literary Genres in the 17th Century
Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry maintained the metrics of Italian origin introduced by Garcilaso, as well as Petrarch’s conception of love. The main themes are:
- Love Poetry: It follows the Petrarchan tradition, although the frequent use of worn-out topics favors moral intensification and parody.
- Moral Poetry: The most representative themes are two that deserve particular attention in the Baroque: a) Time: its power and its relentless, annihilating passage (ruins, skulls); b) Disillusionment: expressed through ideas of the brevity of life and the disorder of the world.
- Religious Poetry: It manifests the spiritual conflicts of the poet.
- Satirical-Burlesque Poetry: It affects all social orders.
Lyric poetry reached its peak with the works of Lope de Vega, Góngora, and Quevedo, who also cultivated other genres.
Theater
During the 17th century, national theater was a spectacle to which all types of people had recourse, from kings to the most popular audiences. Plays were performed in “corrales de comedias,” and their intention was to entertain the people and convey the values of the monarchy and the empire. The great figures of 17th-century theater were Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, although it was Lope who established the guidelines and explained them, in verse, in his book *The New Art of Making Plays in This Time*. The characteristics of the new theatrical formula created by Lope de Vega are as follows:
- Division of the play into three acts instead of five.
- Mixture of the tragic and the comic.
- Breaking of the rule of the three classical unities: the action does not occur in a single place, in a single day, or with a single plot.
- Metric variety: the stanzas vary according to the theme or situation of which they speak.
- Poetic decorum: the way the characters speak should suit their social condition.
- Introduction of lyrical elements interspersed in the action.
Rhetorical Devices
- Hyperbaton: Inversion of the logical order of words. It is used to highlight a word over others.
- Epithet: Used with an expressive purpose and to highlight certain qualities of the noun it accompanies, e.g., “white snow.”
- Polysyndeton: Used to give the phrase greater slowness and solemnity, e.g., “clogs in the morning.”
- Ellipsis: Gives the phrase greater rapidity and suggestive power, omitting a word that is understood, e.g., “parallelism.”
- Parallelism: Used to intensify certain concepts. Repetition of the word at the beginning.
- Metaphor: Used to establish a relationship between two elements with an aesthetic purpose, e.g., “its moon of precious parchment.”
- Simile: Used to establish a relationship between two elements with an expressive aesthetic purpose, e.g., “like iron.”
- Personification: Used to project the sensation of vitality onto an inanimate subject that can reflect the sentiments of another, e.g., “the smiling city.”
- Hyperbole: Used to exaggerate the importance of an object, e.g., “my beloved, even the air hurts me.”
- Antithesis: Used to enhance the meaning of two opposing terms, e.g., “when the river cries.”
- Enumeration: Used to present a detailed analysis of a reality, e.g., “run, pass, and dream.”
- Rhetorical Question: Used to express emotional tension.