Spanish Baroque Poetry: Góngora and Quevedo
Spanish Baroque Poetry: Góngora and Quevedo
1. Luis de Góngora
1.1. Minor Poems
Luis de Góngora wrote numerous sonnets on diverse themes:
- Love: Often a disillusioned vision. Love is presented as fleeting, unreciprocated, and linked to sleep. It’s often attributed to mythical beings or shepherds, not a personal feeling. The backdrop is typically the classic pastoral locus amoenus, with an idealized Petrarchan beloved.
- Circumstantial and Laudatory: Dedicated to praising famous people, cities, writers, friends, or events (e.g., Philip III and his wife hunting).
- Philosophical and Religious: Concerned with life’s brevity, death, and disappointment.
- Satire and Burlesque: Targeting Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, or the vices of the court and society.
He also wrote letrillas, minor art in verse with a chorus after each stanza. Topics vary but include satire and burlesque.
Góngora’s romances are a true highlight, particularly his innovative captive romances and those about fishing and hunting. Like the letrillas, the romances have two groups: burlesque and serious (love, lyric, mythological).
1.2. Major Poems
Here, Góngora showcases his complex culterano style. These works include The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea (1612) and The Solitudes (1613).
The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea retells the classical myth of the Cyclops Polyphemus. Enamoured with Galatea and jealous of her relationship with Acis, Polyphemus kills the young man. Thanks to divine intervention, Acis transforms into a river. The poem comprises sixty-three octaves, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its complex syntax and hyperbaton create extreme difficulty.
The Solitudes (1613), conceived as four parts, only has the first and part of the second completed (around two thousand verses in silvas). The plot is simple: a young castaway, rejected by his love, arrives on a coast, meets shepherds, attends a wedding, lives with a fisherman and his family, and then moves on. The descriptions of nature are notable, suggesting Góngora’s intent to showcase the benefits of rural life over court life. The plot serves as a pretext for his culterano style and idealized nature descriptions.
2. Francisco de Quevedo
2.1. Moral-Philosophical Poems
Metaphysical Poetry: Quevedo expresses life’s tragic sense and the Baroque spirit’s contradictions. Some poems lament life’s brevity and time’s passage, while others embrace Christian asceticism or view death positively.
Moral Poems: These satirize the world’s corruption and Spanish reality from a stoic perspective. Stoicism, a philosophy from third-century Athens, emphasizes internal virtue over external objects. Wisdom and self-control free individuals from disturbing passions. The four main virtues are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.
Religious Poems: Death is liberation, but there’s conflict between Quevedo’s beliefs and his (often fearful) feelings.
2.2. Love Poems
Quevedo’s Petrarchan love poems present a contradiction: love transcends death and hardship, yet it’s also an unattainable ideal. These are among the most beautiful in Spanish poetry, despite Quevedo’s alleged misogyny and lack of a real-life muse. The name “Lisi” appears, but it likely doesn’t represent a real woman.
2.3. Satirical and Burlesque Poetry
Repeat the themes listed in serious but used his poetry in them the mockery and satire. It is common to distinguish between satirical poetry, which presents a moral background, and poetry, burlesque, which shows a taste for debasing reality. In the language of these poems is the most accomplished of the concept: puns, dilogy, difficult concepts, etc.
These poems are characteristic of the deformity and caricature, irony, hyperbole, contrast and humor.
Best known are the satires directed at literary enemies, especially Luis de Gongora, his rival and antagonist.