Baroque Literature: Characteristics, Styles, and Trends
Baroque Literature
Definition of Baroque
The Baroque period, following the Renaissance, extended and finalized its artistic renewal while also representing a reaction against its ideological and aesthetic principles. It reached its peak in Spanish literature, crowning the Golden Age initiated by the Renaissance. The Baroque period was not just a historical era but a broader societal movement.
Literary Aesthetics and Stylistic Trends
The core themes of Baroque literature include:
- Epic: Drawing upon the romantic and mythological legacy of the Renaissance.
- Religious, Moral, and Political: Reflecting the disillusionment characteristic of the Baroque era.
- Picaresque and Satirical: Addressing social criticism and disappointment.
- National Historical or Legendary: Exploring national narratives and myths.
However, Baroque literature possessed its own distinct originality. Baroque writers prioritized originality, creative individuality, and rhetorical surprise.
- They sought novelty and unconventional methods to captivate the reader with complexity and challenge their comprehension.
- They employed ingenuity to transcend vulgarity, either by embellishing thoughts with rich language or by revitalizing subtle ideas through ellipses, antithesis, or paradox.
- They aimed not to imitate nature but to transform it, creating a new artistic beauty—an artifice to overcome or reshape reality.
Therefore, we can establish the following comparison with the Renaissance:
| Renaissance | Baroque |
|---|---|
| 1. Exaltation of the world and human life | 1. Devaluation of human life and nature |
| 2. Enjoyment of the present | 2. Life as a problem |
| 3. Reality | 3. Transience and limitation |
| 4. Optimism | 4. Anxiety and pessimism |
| 5. Formal beauty and serenity | 5. Violence and distorted forms |
| 6. Equilibrium and peace | 6. Dynamism and movement |
| 7. Harmony | 7. Contrast |
| 8. Natural elegance and simplicity | 8. Artifice, elegance, and difficulty |
Trends in Learned Poetry
Baroque cultured poetry continued the legacy of Renaissance and Italianate poetry, preserving its achievements, including the pentameter verse, suitable for lyrical expression, and the sonnet and song as the most distinctive strophic forms. Poets, in turn, formed two distinct groups:
- Those who disrupted the traditional balance between content and expression, known as culteranismo.
- Those who upheld the aesthetic ideal of naturalness and the classical selection of the Renaissance.
Baroque poetry is generally categorized into three trends: culteranismo, conceptismo, and classicism.
Culteranismo Poetry
Culteranismo, or Gongorism (named after Luis de Góngora), a Mannerist style, embraced the Renaissance heritage and its idealization of beauty but transformed its themes and employed exaggerated rhetoric. Culteranismo poets crafted intricate works with strong formal contrasts, grounded in sensory perceptions and a daring rhetoric. They disrupted the balance between form and content, prioritizing a beautiful and harmonious expression to create a heightened sense of beauty and escape reality. It was an attempt to construct artificial and perfect worlds through aesthetics and sensory experiences.
Its notable features include:
- Perfect use of verses and stanzas for superior musicality through parallels, bimembreciones, alliterations, and rhymes.
- Masterful use of sublime metaphors for reality and elements of nature.
- Impeccable poetic language processing through cultism and rhythmic sound.
- Empowerment of mythological themes to become ornamental and liberating worlds.
- Exquisite syntactic complication based on subordination, clauses, insertions, and, in combination with them, the boldest hyperbaton variants.
The originator and most prominent representative of this trend was Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561-1627).
Conceptista Poetry
The association by similarity or contradiction between objects to form a “concept” was the foundation of conceptista poetry and was not a novel idea. What distinguished 17th-century conceptismo was the intense accumulation of verbal wit, semantic games, and ellipses in poems. Conceptista poets shaped their style with specific linguistic resources:
- Figures of thought to express the relationship or contrast between objects: oxymoron, antithesis, paradox, metaphor, hyperbole, etc.
- Various word games to multiply and distort meanings, creating multiple interpretations, double entendres, ambiguities, etc.
- Phonetic games: paronomasia, pun, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc.
- Syntactic devices to shift grammatical categories of words (e.g., adjectives to nouns) or disrupt the logical order of sentences with hyperbaton.
- Procedures to intensify words through composition and derivation or renew the lexicon with the introduction of risky neologisms.
The leading figure of conceptista poetry was Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645).
Classical Poetry
The classical trend encompassed poets who, despite the influence of Góngora and Quevedo, sought to maintain the formal and aesthetic ideals of Renaissance poetry. They emphasized balance, serenity, emotional restraint, sobriety, and the natural style established by 16th-century poets, providing a framework for Baroque themes such as the brevity of life, the passage of time, and disillusionment. Poets of the Seville school, including Francisco de Rioja (1583-1659), Rodrigo Caro (1573-1647), and Angel Fernandez de Andrada (1575?-1648?), among others, belonged to this trend.