Baroque Literature: Crisis and Disillusionment
Baroque Poetry: Crisis and Disillusionment
Baroque poetry reflects the era’s prevailing sense of disappointment, crisis, and the diversity of motives.
Issues and Trends:
- Love Poetry: Continuing the Renaissance tradition, love poetry expresses the pain of unrequited love. It draws upon Petrarchan imagery and themes of thwarted love and physical descriptions of the beloved.
- Philosophical and Moral Poetry: This genre reflects the pessimism and disillusionment of the era, exploring themes of reality versus appearance, the transience of life, consciousness, and death. It often draws upon Stoic philosophy and emphasizes the need for a virtuous life.
- Religious Poetry: Religious poetry includes celebratory works, spiritual reflections, and expressions of repentance.
- Burlesque Poetry: This genre features parody, humor, mockery, and personal attacks.
Themes and Motifs:
Baroque poetry revisits classical and Renaissance themes but with a shift away from the Renaissance ideal of harmony. Motifs include ruins (symbolizing decay), fleeting beauty (flowers, timepieces), and themes of death and the passage of time (ubi sunt, memento mori, carpe diem).
Formal Aspects:
- Meter: There was a resurgence of shorter verse forms, particularly the octosyllabic line, used in various combinations like seguidillas, villancicos, letrillas, and romances. There was a tendency to group lines into quatrains and introduce refrains.
- Style: Baroque poetry is characterized by wit and elaborate poetic devices, evident in both serious and satirical works. The conceptismo style emphasizes conveying profound thoughts through metaphors, comparisons, and circumlocutions. Contrasts and contradictions are highlighted through antithesis, oxymoron, paradox, and hyperbaton. The language is often ornate, with an abundance of cultisms (learned words) alongside colloquialisms and vulgarisms.
New Romances:
The early 17th century saw the publication of collections of romances, including a continuation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. These new romances addressed a wider range of themes, incorporating lyrical and narrative elements and moving beyond the Petrarchan model. Popular types included Moorish romances, pastoral romances, and humorous or parodic takes on Renaissance themes.
Major Authors:
Luis de Góngora:
- Works:
- Shorter poems: Romances (Moorish, pastoral, burlesque), letrillas (burlesque and satirical)
- Sonnets: Love sonnets (following Petrarchan models with variations), burlesque sonnets, religious and moral sonnets (themes of disillusionment and the brevity of life)
- Longer poems: Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea (in octaves) and Solitudes (in blank verse), known for their expressive refinement.
- Style: Abundant mythological references, use of a refined lexicon, and accumulation of rhetorical devices.
Lope de Vega:
- Works:
- Romances: Moorish, pastoral, religious, and moral themes
- Love poetry: Petrarchan themes of love, mythological poems and epics
- Religious poetry: Poems of devotion to the Virgin Mary, confessions of guilt and repentance, sacred verses, and poems on human and divine love.
- Style: Influenced by Renaissance stylistic features, simplicity of expression, and clear concepts, although he also experimented with Góngora’s style.
Francisco de Quevedo:
- Works:
- Love poetry: Following the Petrarchan model
- Moral and metaphysical poetry: Stoic influence, themes of the fleeting nature of life, the deception of appearances, awareness of death, and criticism of the vices of his time while defending virtue.
- Satirical and burlesque poetry: Criticizes customs, social types, degrades classical myths, and parodies heroic poetry and Petrarchan themes.
- Occasional and descriptive poems.
Baroque Prose:
Narrative Prose:
Baroque prose saw the development of fictional and narrative forms with intellectual, moralistic, didactic, and often satirical purposes.
Genres include:
- Pastoral novel
- Picaresque novel
- Byzantine novel (e.g., María de Zayas)
Picaresque:
- Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán: Published in two parts (1599 and 1604). The novel follows the life of a rogue, Guzmán, and is interspersed with moral reflections by the narrator, serving a didactic purpose. It exemplifies the religious and didactic concerns of the author and covers various aspects of life—ethics, social customs, culture, economics—with an emphasis on themes like money, honor, and work. The style combines plain language, slang, and colloquialisms with learned vocabulary and expressive, evaluative discourse.
- El Buscón by Francisco de Quevedo: Features a miserable, fictionalized autobiographical character who aspires to social climbing. The protagonist shows no remorse for his actions, and the novel reiterates themes of shame, violence, and the desire to thrive. The work has generated debate: some see it as witty and sharp, while others view it as a moralizing text.