Culteranismo and Conceptismo: Baroque Poetry in Spain
Trends in Baroque Poetry
Cultured Baroque poetry continued the legacy of Renaissance meters and maintained its achievements. Among these, the hendecasyllable verse, suitable for lyrical expression, and the sonnet and song, as more strophic poems, are to be highlighted. Poets formed two very distinct groups:
- Those who broke the classical balance between content and expression, i.e., culteranos and conceptistas, and, like Lope de Vega, harmonized both trends.
- Those who maintained the aesthetic ideal of naturalness and selection of Renaissance classicism.
Baroque poetry is distinguished by three trends: culteranismo, conceptismo, and classical poetry.
Culterano Poetry: Luis de Góngora
Culterano poets conceived lyric poetry as a complex of strong formal contrasts, based on sensory perceptions and risky rhetoric. They broke the balance between form and content, endowing it with a beautiful and harmonious expression to give an embellished vision of the world and thus escape from reality. It was a way of trying to create perfect aesthetic and sensory artificial worlds.
Among its most notable features are:
- Perfect use of lines and stanzas for high musicality.
- Masterful treatment of metaphor.
- Impeccable poetic transformation of language through learned words and rhythmic sound.
- Promotion of mythological themes.
- Exquisite syntactic complication with the most audacious variants of hyperbaton.
The creator of the trend and its highest representative was the Cordoban Luis de Góngora y Argote. His poetic expression can be defined as a combination of ornamental and sensory exuberance with complex concepts.
He had two different styles of poetry: on the one hand, short poems of a popular and traditional type, the “clear Góngora,” and on the other hand, the educated, the “dark Góngora,” which include: La Galatea and Soledades.
- Góngora was a master of the art of the sonnet and formal perfection. The sonnets dealt with themes ranging from humorous, burlesque, and satirical to the sacred and ascetic, going through Petrarchan love in nature.
- Polyphemus, a long poem written in stanzas, is a masterpiece that tells the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus and the nymph Galatea. The beauty of the poem is unique, as is its artistry and syntax.
- Soledades was the culmination of the culterano style; its narrative character was hidden under poetic ornament. It is an unfinished work; of the four parts that the project consisted of, he only wrote two. In the first Soledad, the arrival of a castaway to the ground is narrated, where he is picked up by some goatherds. The second Soledad tells of the union of fishermen, who tell of their love and disdain for their beloved, and the presence of fishing chores.
Fans of Góngora, such as Juan Peralta Tassis, known as “The Count of Villamediana,” wrote excellent sonnets and long poems, such as the fable of Apollo and Daphne. Pedro Soto de Rojas fulfilled Góngora in his Paradise. Juan de Jáuregui, first an enemy and critic of Góngora, participated in later works like Orpheus in culteranismo. Pedro de Espinosa, also anti-Góngora at first, followed the trend with the fable of the Genil.
Conceptista Poetry: Francisco de Quevedo
The association by similarity or contradiction between objects forming a concept, on which conceptista poetry was based, was not new. What was peculiar to the concept was the intense accumulation in the poems of verbal wit and games.