Spanish Baroque Literature: Concepts, Poetry, and Prose
Spanish Baroque Literature
3. Assessment
The Concept and Culteranismo
a) The Concept
The concept is more concerned with content and resorted to using antithesis, paradoxes, puns, metaphors, and sound effects.
b) The Culteranismo
The culteranismo pursued beauty and expression through form.
Topics of the Baroque
There are two main themes:
The great Renaissance themes: love, nature, mythology.
Moralizing themes, which reflected on the brevity of life and earthly things.
The Renaissance themes developed in accordance with the baroque attitude:
Love is a transcendent feeling.
Nature was viewed through a moralistic lens: the loss of her beauty.
Mythology was a landmark in two respects: it could become a source of beauty or a rhetorical game.
Themes arising from disillusionment and pessimism:
The dream became a symbol of life and death.
The mirror became a symbol of disappointment.
The problem of critical severity influenced Spain.
2.5. Poetry of Lope de Vega
He resorted to diverse forms to harmonize the brilliance and subtlety of the conceptista and culto styles. Lope had a life full of anxieties, caused by his passions of love, both human and religious.
Lyrical poetry of great beauty, a synthesis of tradition and cultured songbooks influenced by Latinizing Renaissance. He excelled in religious matters.
The epic poem Dragontea.
Satirical and burlesque poetry.
Lyrics of a popular kind, rich in rhythm and perfection in simplicity and spontaneity.
2.3. The Culto Poetry of Luis de Góngora
Features
Use of verses and stanzas to achieve great musicality.
Canon treatment of metaphor.
Cultism and rhythmic sound.
Emphasis on mythological themes.
Syntactic complication through hyperbaton.
The creator was Luis de Góngora y Argote, whose life was spent in court.
His poetry can be defined as a set of ornamental and sensory exuberance.
In the long poem Polyphemus, written in stanzas, he recreated the myth of the love affair of the Cyclops Polyphemus with the nymph Galatea.
Solitudes was the culmination of the culterano style. It is an unfinished work. The argument was only a pretext for the poet to deploy all his powers of expression.
Fans included the Count of Villamediana, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Juan de Jauregui, and Pedro de Espinosa.
2.4. Concepts Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo
He was the master of the concept. He employed verbal wit, semantic games, and ellipses. Conceptista poets shaped their style with very specific linguistic resources:
Rhetorical figures of thought: antithesis, metaphor, and so on.
Different varieties of puns.
Phonics games.
Syntactic artifices through hyperbaton.
Procedures using intensifier words.
The greatest figure of the concept was Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas of Madrid. Belonging to a noble family and closely related to the court. He was not a peaceful man, but passionate and violent. His poems ranged from the profound and philosophical to the most satirical and burlesque.
His continuing concern for the idealization and the superhuman world.
His interest in the subhuman and plebeian world.
2. The Narrative Prose
2.1. The Picaresque Novel
The picaresque novel’s delimitation is achieved by Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. The novel followed and confirmed in principle the structure of Lazarillo de Tormes.
Fictional autobiography
Succession of episodic memories
A situation of shame
Dishonorable origin of the protagonist
The struggle for survival
Mateo Alemán added other characteristics that defined the genre:
Moralizing intent. The text inserted in the middle of the action included successive moralizing rhetoric that influenced later novels.
Bitterness, sarcasm, and pessimism caused by the bleak vision of life replaced the mood of Lazarillo.
Critical social attitudes reflected reality.
The realism of Lazarillo became deformed stylization in Guzmán.
New baroque rhetorical guidelines.
In Quevedo’s Buscón, two aspects stand out:
He broke with the picaresque novel model by introducing newly created characters as caricatures.
He accumulated in the text all the richness of baroque rhetoric.
In this work, the protagonist Pablos’ autobiographical fiction selected episodes from his life chronologically.
2.2. The Critical and Moral Prose
The Baroque period brought the flourishing of political, satirical, and moral writings, which were the result of pessimism and disappointment. Even for predominantly thoughtful and serious texts, writers adopted language and writing as a field of inquiry for verbal and clever games.
The reaction to the political situation had two directions: satirical and burlesque intent, and didactic and moralizing attitudes.
3.1. The Satirical Prose
Satire, which originates in Latin literature, was present in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, it was no longer a painful look at society but became a ruthless and cruel pang.
Quevedo was the undisputed master, decrying the vices and social customs. Notable works include Premáticas y deberes, La culta latiniparla, and Los sueños.
3.2. The Moral and Didactic Prose
This prose is conspicuous by its complexity and difficulty. It responds to radical pessimism and disappointment with reality, showing it as an illusion, deception, and nothingness.
Quevedo aimed to combine intelligence, literary ornament, and moral content through language and style. He adopted a hermetic discourse, concentrated, highly developed, and a terse, elliptical style, replete with all the resources of the Baroque.
We highlight the moral treatises of Baltasar Gracián, as a struggle, full of traps to be overcome with effective weapons:
El Héroe sought the formation of the perfect individual.
El Discreto reflected on human behavior.
In the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, he summarized his thinking on the whole human being.
3.3. The Political Prose
Treatises that relate to aspects of public behavior, administration, or government. Quevedo and Gracián stand out.
Quevedo’s Política de Dios, gobierno de Cristo y tiranía de Satanás presented an image of the Christian Prince.
Gracián’s El Político Fernando el Católico analyzed the figure of King Ferdinand.
Saavedra Fajardo
3.4. The Prose of Literary Criticism
Quevedo criticized culteranismo in works such as La culta latiniparla and criticized the use of topical phrases.
Gracián studied the most varied ‘concepts’ or literary artifices.
Saavedra Fajardo: República literaria.