The Poetic Innovations of Luis de Góngora and His Contemporaries
Luis de Góngora
In popular tradition, classical or Petrarchan, Góngora created the most innovative poetic language of the time. His production was difficult and minority-led, resulting in both rejection and fiery polemics, as well as admiration and followers.
Poetry
Minor art and poetry of Petrarch’s poetry:
Worse luck minor art: letrillas, romances, and, above all, satirical and burlesque works.
Sonnets: Themes of love and encouragement to enjoy the Petrarchan line, although they were amended by the consciousness of time. Others are comical, while a third group reflects disappointment and the transience of life.
Major poems: Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea and Solitudes. The Polyphemus is based on the version offered by Ovid. Its main theme is love, emphasizing the pastoral reasons for the importance of landscape description. The book is written in octaves.
Style: Góngora’s style is characterized by its difficulty, due to the mythological allusions. It emphasizes the use of alliteration and paranomasias, with long sentences and complex cultism. In the lexicon, cultism, associative fields, and metaphors related to color and music predominate.
Solitude: In these compositions, in silvas, the description of nature and rural work is emphasized through a poetic language full of refined and expressive resources.
Lope de Vega
Lope was a man of extraordinary capacity in narrative, theater, and opera.
Poetry: His poetry includes minor art compositions (letrillas, carols, seguidillas, romances) and Italianate poetry (sonnets, songs, eclogues, letters).
Romances
Petrarchan type, worse luck. Rimas (1602-1609) includes sonnets, as well as loving poems that are mythological, moral, and circumstantial.
Religious poetry: Sacred Rhymes collected sonnets and other poems of devotion, expressing guilt and regret.
Style: The poetess expresses her experiences and feelings. The classical style is marked by expressive simplicity, showing continuity with earlier poetry while revealing appreciation for the concept.
Francisco Quevedo
Author of an extensive body of work that stands out for its quality and wide range of topics, attitudes, language, meters, and records, consistent with the literature of his time.
Poetic themes:
He wrote poems in both high art and minor art romances.
Love poetry: Has its roots in lyrical cancioneril, celebrating the beauty of the beloved, the inaccessible, and the plain suffering of the lover, as well as loving madness.
Moral and metaphysical poetry: These poems reveal profound disappointment. The author reflects on the brevity and distressing transience of life, the deceitfulness of appearances, and the inevitability of death: life is destined to end.
Satirical and burlesque poetry: Critiques customs and human and social types of the time. Outstanding female figures within the misogyny of satire itself degrade classical myths and Petrarch.
Religious themes: Combines themes of religious poetry with moral poetry, expressing repentance for sins and reflecting on the passion of Christ.
Style:
Extreme use of rhetorical devices, with metaphors derived from comparisons, antitheses, and contrasts. In satirical and burlesque poetry, abundant resources are designed to produce humor and provoke laughter. Colloquial expressions and common registers are prevalent. He is also a master of lexical creation and modification of idioms and sayings, often for parodic purposes.
The Baroque Prose
In the Baroque period, cultured prose includes fiction, narrative, and intellectual works, both didactic and moralizing, often with a satirical edge. Highlights include:
- The Pastoral Novel
- The Byzantine Novel
- The Courtesan Novel
Didactic prose works include historical, political, and religious themes.