Baroque Poetry and Prose: Characteristics, Authors, and Works
Baroque Poetry
Issues and Trends
Love Poetry
Continues the Renaissance poetic idea of pained love expression through thwarted love. The survival of Petrarchist images and physical descriptions of the beloved.
Philosophical and Moral Poetry
Marked by prevailing pessimism and disappointment. Explores the contrast between reality and appearance, the transience of life, consciousness of death, etc. Recovers Stoic ideas and the need for a virtuous life.
Religious Poetry
Predominantly celebratory poetry, also highlighting spiritual reflection and repentance.
Burlesque Poetry
Abundant poetry of parodic and humorous character, including mockery and personal attacks.
Tags and Reasons
Baroque poetry restated Renaissance and classical motifs in correspondence with the abandonment of the Renaissance ideal of harmony. Recurring themes include ruins (symbols of the revocation of things), flowers, clocks, the ubi sunt motif, and the memento mori and carpe diem concepts.
Formal Aspects
Metric
Renewed appreciation for shorter verse forms, especially the octosyllable in its various combinations: seguidillas, villancicos, letrillas, and romances, with a tendency to group lines in quatrains and introduce refrains.
Style
Display of wit and extreme poetic elaboration, manifested in both serious poetry and satire, parody, and burlesque verses. The main stylistic feature is conceptismo: a deep thought expressed in an acute way through rhetorical devices like metaphor, comparison, and periphrasis. The trend towards contrasts and contradictions is evident in the use of antithesis, oxymoron, paradox, and hyperbaton. Excessive use of parallelism and anaphora is also common. The lexicon abounds with both cultismos and colloquial or vulgar terms.
New Romances
At the beginning of the 17th century, general compilations of romances were published, and the second part of the Romancero general flourished. Romance poetry addressed diverse issues, incorporating lyrical-narrative developments and Petrarchism. The most representative types of the new romances were the Moorish and the pastoral. A humorous or parodic approach to Renaissance themes also stands out.
Authors
Luis de Góngora
Poetic Work
- Minor Art: Romances (Moorish, pastoral, burlesque), letrillas (burlesque and satire).
- Sonnets: Love (Petrarchist models with variations), burlesque, religious, and moral (themes of disappointment and brevity of life).
- Major Poems: Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (in octaves) and Soledades (in silvas), of extraordinary expressive refinement.
Style
Abundant mythological references, use of a cultured lexicon, and accumulation of rhetorical devices.
Lope de Vega
Poetic Work
- Romances of Moorish, pastoral, religious, and moral subjects.
- Petrarchist love poetry, mythological poems, and epics: Rimas, La Dragontea, La hermosura de Angélica.
- Religious poetry of devotion, confession of guilt and repentance: Rimas sacras, Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos.
Style
Renaissance stylistic influence, simplicity of expression, although concepts and resources of Góngora’s imitation are also present.
Francisco de Quevedo
Poetic Work
- Love poetry according to the Petrarchist model.
- Moral and metaphysical poetry: Stoic influence, Christian morality, the fugacity of life, the deception of appearances, awareness of death, censure of the vices of his time, defending virtue.
- Satirical and burlesque poetry: criticizes customs, human and social types, degrades classical myths, heroic poetry, and Petrarchist poems.
- Circumstantial and descriptive poems, odes of praise.
Baroque Prose
:
* prose narrative: were cultured d prose fiction and narrative intellectual and moralistic didactic purposes and often satirical.
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