Baroque Poetry: Characteristics, Themes, and Main Authors
Baroque Poetry
1. The Ideology of the Baroque
The Baroque is considered the artistic expression of a worldview influenced by a socio-historical context of conflict.
1.1 Sense of Crisis, Contradiction, and Time
Events leading up to the Baroque period fostered a pessimistic outlook and a sense of disappointment. Uncertainty grew due to the veil of appearances and constant change, causing mistrust and intrigue in the rare and exotic. Reality was perceived as a clash of opposites, both individually and in the growing conflict between people. Themes of human weakness, the fleeting nature of time, and the presence of death became prominent.
1.2 Collective Beliefs
There was dissatisfaction with irrationality, a magical vision of reality, and belief in the supernatural. Simultaneously, there was a growing obsession with the purity of blood, honor, and misogyny.
1.3 Currents of Thought
The conflict-ridden human condition of the Baroque era gave rise to various reactions, such as the pursuit of pleasure and beauty, realistic acceptance, or the comfort of ascetic spirituality.
2. Baroque Poetry
Baroque poetry built upon earlier themes with heightened expressiveness and some innovations, primarily texts expressing disappointment and awareness of the era’s crisis. However, the most prominent feature is the diversity of themes, motives, and approaches.
2.1 Themes
- Love Poetry: Continued the Renaissance concept of love, including Petrarchan imagery and physical descriptions of the beloved. It also explored parody and burlesque.
- Philosophical and Moral Poetry: Marked by pessimism, disappointment, the contrast between reality and appearance, the transience of life, and awareness of death. Stoic ideas and the need for a virtuous life were revived, especially in satirical poetry.
- Religious Poetry: Celebratory poetry prevailed, but spiritual reflection and repentance were also highlighted.
- Burlesque Poetry: Abundant in humorous and parodic elements, including mockery and personal attacks.
2.2 Formal Aspects
Baroque poetry exhibited remarkable formal variety, generic and stylistic diversity, and the use of wit through expressive language.
2.2.1 Metrics
There was a resurgence of minor art forms, particularly octosyllabic verse, in various combinations like seguidillas, carols, letrillas, and especially romances, often in quatrains with refrains. Traditional poem and verse forms continued, and the Italianate Renaissance influence led to the emergence of the silva.
2.2.2 Concepts and Expressive Resources
The display of wit and extreme poetic elaboration were evident in both serious poetry and satire, parody, and burlesque. The primary tool was the concept (association of ideas), expressed through rhetorical devices like metaphors, comparisons, and periphrasis. Antithesis, oxymorons, and paradoxes were also common. The need for surprise led to the use of dilogy, such as retruécano and hyperbole. Excessive parallels, anaphora, and cultisms were prominent, as were colloquial and vulgar terms.
3. Luis de Góngora
Góngora created the most innovative poetic language of his time, generating both rejection and admiration among readers.
3.1 Poetic Works
Góngora practiced both minor art and Petrarchan poetry, exploring various subjects with both elevated and parodic approaches.
- Minor Art Poetry: Cultivated Moorish romances, pastoral, historical, and burlesque styles, with the latter emphasizing the parody of Pyramus and Thisbe. Letrillas, especially burlesque and satirical ones, were also notable.
- Sonnets: Addressed themes of love and enjoyment in the Petrarchan tradition, but with an awareness of time. Others were ludicrous, and a third group focused on disappointment and the transience of life.
- Major Poems: Included the Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea and Soledades. The main theme was love, but pastoral elements and landscape descriptions were also important. These works were written in octaves.
3.2 Style
Góngora’s style was characterized by its difficulty, due to mythological allusions, the use of cultisms, and a complex rhetorical structure.
- Phonetic Level: Emphasized the use of alliteration and paronomasia.
- Syntactic Level: Used long and complex sentences, allusive periphrasis, learned vocabulary, absolute constructions, extreme hyperbaton, bimembres lines, correlations, and repeated structures.
- Lexical Level: Learned words predominated, with an emphasis on sensory elements, associative fields, and metaphors related to color and music.
4. Francisco de Quevedo
Quevedo’s work stands out for its quality and thematic, attitudinal, metrical, and linguistic variety, reflecting the literature of his time. His poems were circulated in manuscripts, anthologies, and two posthumous editions of The Spanish Parnassus.
4.1 Poetic Themes
Quevedo wrote both major and minor art poetry. His work can be classified thematically:
- Love Poetry: Rooted in cancionero poetry, classical Latin poetry, and Petrarchism. Quevedo developed familiar themes: the beauty of the unattainable beloved, suffering and tears of love, love’s madness, faithful love beyond death.
- Moral and Metaphysical Poetry: Influenced by Christian morality and Stoicism, these poems reveal profound disappointment. Quevedo reflects on the brevity and transience of life, the deception of appearances, and the inevitability of death.
- Satirical and Burlesque Poetry: Criticizes customs and human and social types of the time. Misogynistic portrayals of women are prominent, along with other vices like hypocrisy and deceit.
- Religious Poetry: Combines religious and moral themes. Repentance for sins is a central theme, and other poems reflect on the Passion of Christ.
Quevedo also composed circumstantial and courteous praise poetry dedicated to nobles and heroes of antiquity, as well as descriptive poetry.
4.2 Style
Quevedo’s poetry exhibits extensive use of rhetorical devices, complex expression of ideas, and the practice of wit and ingenuity. His verses feature metaphors, comparisons, antitheses, and contrasts. Burlesque poetry abounds in caricature aimed at provoking laughter. In his serious style, the use of learned vocabulary, hyperbaton, and an admonishing tone stand out. Quevedo was also a master of lexical creation and the modification of idioms and sayings, primarily for parodic purposes.