Baroque Poetry: Quevedo, Góngora, Themes and Techniques
Quevedo’s Style: Characterized by a focus on the “bottom,” Quevedo’s work is marked by ingenious ideas and sharp language. He employs short phrases, rhythm, and a prose filled with antitheses, paradoxes, and parallels, creating both mobility and difficulty. His style is evident in both prose and verse. Quevedo uses a variety of puns, contributing multiple meanings through words with different but similar sounds (paronomasias). He uses syntactic devices, such as hyperbaton, to upset the logical order of sentences. He also collects and bypasses procedures through composition and distorts reality, creating neologisms. His poetic style often exaggerates significance through hyperbole, providing antithetical or opposite ideas. His work is found in two books: “Spanish Parnassus, the last three muses.”
Love Poetry
Quevedo’s love poetry follows the Petrarchan tradition, focusing on the suffering of the lover, with themes of longing to die and crying. He uses repeated expressions such as “black tears” and “dull sea.”
Metaphysical Poetry
His metaphysical poetry arises from the fear of life and existence, exploring the great Baroque themes: death, the transience of time, and disappointment.
Satirical Burlesque Poetry
Quevedo’s satirical burlesque poetry responds to social and moral concerns, serving as an outlet for the poet’s temperament.
Political Poetry
His political poetry focuses on two essential ideas: the problem of Spain and the reporting of his painful awareness of the material and spiritual decay of the country.
Culteranismo: This style, exemplified by Góngora, is concerned with the expression of form, aiming to create a sensory world of beauty. It uses literary devices such as metaphor and hyperbaton and is primarily found in verse. Góngora uses verse almost exclusively, employing metaphor to sublimate the vulgar. Through cultism, he poetically transforms reality, frequently using antepenultimate forms to offer beauty and rhythmic precision. He ennobles mythological themes, creating ornamental structures that allow escape from reality and foster an elitist consciousness. He offers sophisticated metrics and creates syntax with hyperbaton variants.
Key Themes in Baroque Poetry
- Love: Acquires transcendent meaning, preserving Petrarchan images like “light burn,” but it is primarily a feeling, with an attempt to “eternalize” it beyond death.
- Nature: Provides moralizing examples. Plants and flowers, especially roses, become symbols of beauty turning to dust.
- Mythology: Serves as a landmark and genesis of issues, ennobled by Baroque brilliance.
- Disappointment and Pessimism: Typical of the Baroque era.
- The Dream: Becomes a symbol of life and death, part of the double conception of the world as reality and appearance.
- Time: Remains mobile and fleeting, finding a symbol in the clock, a core element in several poems.
- Ubi Sunt?: The reason for ruins points to the fragility of things.
- Disappointment: Reflects the return of Stoic philosophy, coupled with the feeling of the shortness of life.
- Spain’s Problem: Frames the political environment, reflecting the decline of Spain.