Baroque Literature in Spain

Posted on Nov 14, 2024 in Latin

Melancholy, Disappointment, and Contempt of the Mundane

Original Effect. Ingenio Staff. Original Artist

Excess, Exaltation, Contrasts. Artifice, Complication.

Tendencies

Culteranismo: Artificial exaggeration of language and literary devices to create a world of absolute beauty. This movement uses many literary devices, such as images, metaphors, allegories, and mythological allusions.

The concept is based on ingenious ideas, words, and concepts. Sharpness of thought and ingenious wit are particularly interesting. There are often puns and words or phrases in juxtaposition.

Exaggerated realism is reflected in the picaresque and satirical literature. The thematic motifs are more unpleasant aspects of reality.

Topics

• Love, Petrarchan line
• Platonic view of nature (becomes a background decoration)
• Mythology
• Disappointment (the most important issue, visible from several points of view: ambition, power, transience of time, and thoughts of death)
• Current comic and burlesque

Góngora’s Poetry

In the early years of the Baroque period, poetry manifested through literary trends like Gongorism or Culteranismo.

His poetry is usually divided into two groups: folk-inspired compositions in short meters, and Cultist poetry in heroic verse.

Most important are the letrillas and romances. The beauty of his poems lies in the pooling of resources and popular Baroque devices. The romances offer a varied range of themes: Moorish captives, romance, love, or burlesque.

Within his work in Cult meters, his sonnets are of great beauty and formal perfection. They can be classified into three themes: satirical and burlesque poems, love sonnets, and sonnets of praise for illustrious characters. Maximum complication arrives in two great poems: The Polyphemus and Solitudes.

The Tale of Polyphemus and Galatea is written in stanzas with syntactic complications, metaphors, and images.

The Solitude is a complex poem in form. Góngora planned four solitudes, but only wrote the first and part of the second.

Góngora uses religion and languages as resources for metaphors. Mythological motifs are used as remote from reality.

Cervantes

Cervantes wrote romances and other compositions. As a playwright, he had no fortune. As an author of novels, Cervantes is considered the creator of the modern novel, giving this narrative genre great complexity and wealth.

His other famous work was The Twelve Exemplary Novels, a type of Italian novel with a didactic and moral character. But the most important works of the period are La Gitanilla, El Licenciado Vidriera, and Rinconete y Cortadillo.

Don Quixote, the most universal work of Spanish literature, was published in two parts: the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. Before the second part appeared, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (who could be Lope de Vega) signed a continuation in Tarragona.

The author’s purpose in writing the work was to discredit the books of chivalry.

Don Quixote is more than a mockery of the chivalric genre. Its actions, characters, themes, and behaviors have achieved worldwide fame.

This book is clear, spontaneous, natural, full of adventures and events, entertaining, and profound.

Lope de Vega

Lope de Vega developed a poetic style halfway between Culteranismo and Conceptismo, melting cultured and popular elements. The main features of his work are vitality and optimism.

He wrote narrative poems, such as La Gatomachia, and literary treatises, such as Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. His lyrical poetry surpasses all his other works.

In his popular poetry, Lope cultivated all types of romances: pastoral, Moorish, Christmas carols, road songs, wedding songs, seguidillas, etc. The transparency and musicality of the compositions stand out.

In his cultured poetry, the astounding three thousand sonnets he wrote are noteworthy, many of them as part of his comedies. The topics are varied: pastoral, mythological, historical. In his poems, the themes are loneliness, the beauty of nature, rural life, freedom, Madrid customs, festivals, or religious themes. His poems of love, disappointment, and jealousy are noteworthy. Much of his poetry is also deeply religious, reflecting his spiritual crises and painful regrets.

In form, his poetry is typical of the period: abundance of metaphors, complexity in their use, search for sensationalism and wit, and use of artificial resources.

Quevedo and Conceptism

Conceptism is a poetic style based on the sharpness of wit and conceptual play. Quevedo was the maximum representative of this current. His work expresses the duality of his character.

The mockery of social customs and satirical criticism, focused on the vision of the world as a farce, are the main themes of his earlier writings.

The moral tone is based on deception. Faced with a reality full of misleading and false appearances, Quevedo discovers one indisputable truth: death.

His poetry can be divided into three groups:

• Ascetic compositions: contempt for false appearances, the transience of earthly life, the decay of tangible things, ideas about death and disappointment.
• Love poetry: aestheticism and ingenuity substitute for moral reflection.
• Satirical-burlesque compositions: Quevedo used either short meters or heroic verse. In this poetry, he takes concepts to the extreme through word games, double meanings, and antithesis. The distortion of reality becomes caricature.

Renaissance vs. Baroque