Baroque Literary Themes and Poetic Styles
Baroque Literature: Themes and Characteristics
Thematic Foundations of Baroque Literature
Baroque literature reflected the climate of political-economic decline and social tension of the times, which is why its works are filled with realism. The themes and topics used recreate a pessimistic and disconcerting vision of the world and life. These include:
- The Vanities of Life: Baroque authors expressed their criticisms and vicious irony by depicting the vanities of the world.
- Transience and Ephemeral Existence: This theme highlights the misleading and ephemeral nature of human evolution, emphasizing the early arrival of death and stressing the brevity of youth and beauty. At other times, life is presented as a dream or as a performance.
- The Struggle for Control Over Existence: Misery and poverty are a constant in human life, and characters often seek a lifestyle that would allow them to escape these difficulties.
Lyrical Characteristics of the Baroque Era
Baroque poets were eager to impress and dazzle their audience.
Metrical Innovations
Eleven-syllable verse and metric models from the Renaissance continued, but breaking with the dogma of classical decorum where each topic was expected to be treated with a specific meter. Authors used themes and verses outside the rules issued by tradition. An important development was the use of letrillas, which consist of eight-syllable verses and have a chorus and a verse back, similar to Christmas carols.
Recurring Lyrical Themes
- Love: Themes still present from the Renaissance in Baroque love poetry are repeated, along with many topics and images of Renaissance poetry, but expressed in the form of antithesis.
- Mythology: The mythological world acquires a high profile, and recreating scenes from it constitutes an important source of inspiration for authors.
- Nature: Landscape and garden descriptions are carried out to highlight the beauty of their components, often to frame human conflicts. Sometimes, nature is presented through contrasts, juxtaposing the beautiful and the ugly, the light and the dark.
- Satire and Mockery: Writers made fun of all kinds of issues and created humorous compositions.
- The Transience of Life: Over time, various descriptions can represent this theme, such as ruins in a landscape where before everything was wonderful, or the fleeting beauty of women.
- Other Topics: Additionally, beyond the themes explored by previous poets, they also addressed religious and political subjects.
Major Lyrical Trends
Culteranismo Lyric
Luis de Góngora is the foremost exponent of Culteranismo poetry, a current that cultivates a highly stylistic approach to create beauty and to impress the reader’s senses with stimuli of light, color, and sound. Góngora subjected language to a difficult linguistic operation: Latinization of syntax through hyperbaton, and vocabulary through cultism, along with the maximization of the music, color, and brightness of the language.
Stylistic Features of Góngora’s Lyric:
- Hyperbaton
- Metaphors
- Cultism
- Adjectives
- Mythology
Conceptismo Lyric
The Conceptista poet explores the idea of words from a series of games of verbal acuity, in order to impress the intelligence of the receiver and force the language to the limit of its meaning. The poetry of Francisco de Quevedo is the most representative literary trend called Conceptism. Quevedo was a true stylist of the language. He was not interested in cultivating the mere form of words, but rather that these words have the power to express what states and cause subtle reasoning.
Stylistic Resources in Conceptismo:
- Neologisms
- Metaphor
- Adjectives
- Dilogy
- Antithesis