Spanish Literature of the Renaissance and Baroque Periods
The Renaissance (16th Century)
Poetry: Rebirth
1. Italianate Petrarchist Poetry: Garcilaso de la Vega
The Italian Petrarchist model influenced the poetry of the 16th century. Authors like Boscan and Garcilaso adopted this style.
Subjects:
- Love: Sometimes it serves as a source of dissatisfaction and sadness, and sometimes as a regenerating and purifying spirit. Love is expressed towards a beloved who has exceptional beauty, a reflection of divinity. The divinization of the beloved becomes an almost religious act. The source of love also results in frustration due to the disdainful attitude of the beloved. The poet’s suffering caused by this disdain leads him to withdraw into himself or to reproach the lady for her elusive character.
- Nature: It frames the love relationships and symbolizes natural perfection. Ideal places for romantic scenes include green meadows and crystal-clear waters.
- Myths: Taken from thematic occasions as a literary expression of reflections or feelings.
They employed novel metric forms of poetry, such as the hendecasyllable verse. Graphic forms include the sonnet, the terceto, the royal octave, the lira, and the silva. The most common compositions are the ode, the eclogue, the elegy, and the epistle.
Garcilaso:
His work consists of compositions in traditional meters, an epistle, 2 elegies, 3 eclogues, 5 songs, and 38 sonnets. The themes of his elegies express his feelings of idealization and intimate love. In the eclogues, Garcilaso’s poetry reaches its perfection. In Eclogue I, the poet unfolds his personal feelings in the figures of the shepherds Salicio and Nemoroso. Through the shepherds’ mouths, he expresses the lament for his beloved’s disdain and the pain for the death of Elisa, highlighting the landscape descriptions. Eclogue II has a more narrative character, and the themes are praise of love and the Duke of Alba. In Eclogue III, nymphs are presented embroidering canvases with mythological scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice, the death of Adonis, and the persecution of Daphne. Eclogue IV is the love story of Elisa and Nemoroso. The influence of Petrarch is remarkable.
Religious Poetry
1 Fray Luis de Leon
His poems did not reach 40. The themes of his poems are: The desire to retreat into peaceful solitude, coexistence with nature, the search for spiritual peace, and communication with the harmony of the universe.
His style is characterized by sobriety and simplicity, with few adjectives and very elemental images. Enjambment and hyperbaton are frequent in his work.
His poems can be grouped into: Poems in the style of Horace, poems with Pythagorean and Platonic influence, religious poems, moral poems, and patriotic poems.
2. San Juan de la Cruz
The poetry that John uses expresses a single spiritual feeling: the love of God. To describe the sensations produced after the mystic encounter with God, he employs motifs such as: the Beloved comes to meet the Beloved.
As for the form and style, the richness and range of the lexicon, the precision in the use of literary resources stand out. His poetry can be summarized in the following compositions: The Dark Night of the Soul (which refers to the experience the soul must have to reach perfection, the union with God), Spiritual Canticle, and Living Flame of Love.
The Prose in the Sixteenth Century
With respect to the novel, the Spanish Renaissance will take on the two manifestations that characterize this movement: the idealized and fantastic invention (books of chivalry and pastoral novels, Moorish and Byzantine), and the critical observation of reality (which will give origin to the picaresque novel).
Didactic Prose
Spanish humanists dealt with moral, historical, and political topics. Two writers stand out: Alfonso de Valdés and Juan de Valdés, whose work is characterized by the use of dialogue.
1. Religious Prose
San Juan de la Cruz explains in mystical prose the experiences of his poetry (Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Canticle, and Living Flame of Love).
Fray Luis de Leon included among his prose works translations: The Perfect Wife.
Santa Teresa de Jesus wrote autobiographical books (The Book of My Life) and mystical books (The Interior Castle).
Prose of Fiction (Novel)
In the 16th century, the novel only included brief stories written in the style of Boccaccio’s Decameron. These narrations were called treatises, stories, or books.
The main narrative genres are:
(Idealistic Novels)
- Books of Chivalry: Recount the exploits of medieval knights with great fantasy and imagination.
- Moorish Novel: Fictional adventures between Arabs and Christians during the Reconquista period.
- Byzantine Novel: Fables of love in distant and imaginary cities.
- Pastoral Novel:
(Realistic Novels)
- Picaresque Novels: Like Lazarillo de Tormes.
The Baroque (17th Century)
Characteristics of the Baroque
The ideology of the Baroque is based on the contrast between attitude and the desire for disappointment in worldly things.
Main features:
- The search for creative originality.
- Tendency to excess and exaggeration.
- The theme of disappointment.
- Artifice and complexity versus simplicity.
The most immediate result is abundant ornamentation.
Literary Trends of the Baroque
The Baroque was an intensification of the Renaissance and features a realistic and satirical creation against those same characteristics.
The following literary trends originated:
- Culteranismo: Artificial exaggeration of language with the aim of creating an absolute world of beauty through excess. The use of images, metaphors, neologisms, Latinisms, and hyperbaton is abundant. The conceit is based on ingenious associations of words and concepts. Word games are frequent.
- Realism: Exaggerated realism is reflected in picaresque and satirical literature.
The Poetry of the Seventeenth Century
Themes
The main themes are love, nature, mythology, the transience of time, and disappointment.
The Poetry of Gongora
Luis de Góngora is the greatest representative of this literary trend. His poetry is often divided into two groups: popular compositions in traditional meters and cultured poetry in hendecasyllable verse.
- The most important in traditional meters are his letrillas and romances. The letrillas range from sentimental to satirical. The romances offer a very wide thematic range: Moorish romances, captive romances, love romances, or burlesque romances.
- Within his cultured poetry, his sonnets of great beauty and perfection stand out. They can be classified into three themes: satirical and burlesque poems, love poems, and poems in praise of illustrious characters. His culterano style reaches its maximum complexity and effectiveness in two great poems: Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea and Soledades.
Góngora intended to create a world of beauty with the help of abundant cultured language. The most characteristic resource is metaphor.
The Poetry of Lope de Vega
In his copious lyrical work, Lope de Vega’s poetry develops a cultured and popular style. The main features of Lope’s work are optimism and vitality. He is an author of numerous narrative poems, didactic poems, and literary epics. His lyric poetry is the one that exceeds in quality above all. Part of it was collected in collections such as Sacred Rhymes and Profane Rhymes.
Quevedo
Quevedo is the poet who best reflects the contrasts of the Baroque. The mockery of social customs and satirical criticism are the main thematic lines of his writing. Faced with a deceptive reality full of false appearances, he discovers a single unquestionable truth: death. His poetry can be divided into three groups: poems about death and disappointment, love poems, and satirical-burlesque poems.