Quevedo and Lope de Vega: Baroque Poetry
Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco de Quevedo belongs to a generation after Góngora and Lope de Vega. He was a man concerned about the affairs of his time, delicate and cruel at the same time. He represents the world of contrasts of the time. His complex social status and physical appearance provided him with a bitter view, expressed through anguish and tears or ridicule.
Subjects
Quevedo’s poetry presents a wide range of themes. He wrote metaphysical, moral, religious, and satirical poems.
Style
Quevedo was a genius of language and its most characteristic features are:
- Use of metaphors
- Unusual substantives
- Superlatives
- Word games
- Hyperbole
- Transfer of meaning
- Creation of new words
- Antithesis
- Oxymoron
- Epithets
- Paranomasias
- Metric: sonnets, silvas, romances and letrillas.
Work
They can be grouped as follows:
- Metaphysical Poetry: Compositions are often sonnets in which the author meditates on the transience of time, the brevity of life, and accepting death.
- Moral Poems: Mostly sonnets that contain reflections on the power of fortune, vices, and virtues.
- Religious Poems: The Catholic Faith, with its contempt for earthly life and preparing to die and have eternal life, is another source of support Quevedo used to overcome vital anguish. These poems are also usually sonnets dedicated to passages and characters from the Bible. Within this group are also the psalms composed in stanzas and seven-syllable hendecasyllabic free.
- Love Poems: Many of them tie in with Quevedo’s metaphysical concerns. Love was a way to reconcile with life and even beat death. This love poetry is characterized by an attempt to clone the Renaissance love lyric. He took Petrarchan images and changed the reasons for loving to hyperbole, metaphors, and personifications.
- Satirical Poems: Satire serves to express his bitterness and disappointment and to develop your fighting linguistic games. His satire targets hypocrisy, the power of money, love, life, and death.
- Poems of Circumstances: These compositions had as recipients characters from the past or present, which allowed for moral and philosophical reflections.
Lope de Vega
He has a great capacity for work and great poetic sensitivity. He is one of the most representative writers of the Golden Ages.
Topics
This author’s life and work are linked so that his compositions are close on issues of a personal nature such as love, God, and faith.
His passionate love affairs, the processes in which he was involved, the courtly and literary festivals in which he participated, and the religious moments of sincere repentance are data that appear as a framework, or as a background theme of his works.
Style
All human and divine love, personal and family, lived by Lope, is reflected in verses. The characteristic traits of his poetry are:
- Life and Poetry: Close relationship between his busy life and poetry.
- Natural and Expressive Clarity: His form of speech was removed from the artificial.
- Passion for Ballads and Traditional Lyrics: His romances were characterized by speed and lack of narrative motifs.
Work
His poetry is extensive. In his verses, he emptied his private life and all the verses, but he especially used romance and sonnet. Lope’s poetry consists of three poetry collections:
- Rimas (Rhymes): Romances went from youth to the sonnets and other poems that are one of the most important examples of Spanish Petrarchan poetry. Many of them are on the themes of love, history, and the Bible.
- Rimas Sacras (Sacred Rhymes): One hundred sonnets of religious themes in which the sentimental expression of love for Jesus is like romantic love. This change is due to the spiritual crisis suffered by the author after the death of his wife and son and further ordination.
- Rimas Humanas y Divinas del Licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (Human and Divine Rhymes of the Licentiate Tomé de Burguillos): Published this song in which Lope creates a literary alter ego: the lawyer Tomé de Burguillos. This mechanism serves to make a smiling and disillusioned parody of earlier work.