Spanish Baroque Literature: Góngora, Quevedo, and 17th Century Poetic Movements
The 17th Century: Spanish Baroque
A cultural and artistic movement developed throughout the seventeenth century, marked by economic, social, and political crises.
Baroque Thought and Culture
A period of pessimism and disillusionment. Humanist ideals gave way to deeper religious introspection. The sense of crisis was reflected in a culture of violent contrasts. Artistic expressions, exhausting their resources, led to exaggeration and force. Spanish literature reached its maximum splendor in this era.
Baroque Attitudes
- Increasing dominance of the senses.
- Happy Vitalism.
- Anguished and resigned acceptance of life (Dodsworth).
Key Literary Themes
- Metaphysical, Moral, and Religious Poetry: A disillusioned conception of life.
- Love Poetry: Themes of love, surviving Petrarchan traditions, but with increased tension; a beautiful lament for an unattainable ideal of deceit and death.
- Satirical and Burlesque Poetry: Moral satire that mocks nonconformist or parodic attitudes. The targets of these satirical characters could be particular faults or habits of the time.
Poetic Forms and Style
Continuous forms, required in the revival:
- Wide variety of meter.
- Great variety of expressive resources.
Culteranismo: Luis de Góngora’s Influence
Luis de Góngora is its creative principle.
Aesthetic Traits of Culteranismo
- Abundant use of cultismos (learned words), providing significant expressiveness and musical value, especially with proparoxytones (esdrújulos).
- Highly complex Latinate syntax and lexicon.
- Employment of colorful rhetorical devices such as metaphor, alliteration, and hyperbaton.
Conceptismo: Wit and Ingenuity
Association of witty and surprising ideas and words. Its main proponents were Francisco de Quevedo and Baltasar Gracián.
Key Features of Conceptismo
- Seeks meaning, not just emotion.
- Creates and connects words with unexpected compositions.
- Employs rhetorical devices such as metaphor and antithesis. The use of oxymoron is particularly important.
Luis de Góngora: Master of Culteranismo
Góngora’s Poetic Style
- Pictorial Sense: Descriptive and sensory poetry, focusing on contemplative attitudes and the creation of images.
- Landscape: A central motif of his work.
- Cultism and Popular Mix: Blends learned language with popular elements.
- Satire and Panegyric: Cultivated two contradictory types of poetry: satire and praise for nobles.
Themes in Góngora’s Poetry
Wide variety of themes.
Góngora’s Poetic Devices
The most obvious feature is its difficulty. The poet uses metaphors, alliterations, hyperbatons, and cultismos to avoid direct expression and enhance the musicality of the verses.
Cultismos
Learned words used to elevate language from the everyday.
Hyperbaton
A syntactic cultismo that Góngora uses for reflexivity, linguistic fluidity, and to emphasize the phonetic value of colorful words.
Mythological Allusions
Functions as a transition from abstract to concrete symbols.
Metaphor
Góngora used metaphor as a formula for stylization.
Góngora’s Major Works
Góngora’s poetry falls into two sections:
- Popular Poetry: Compositions in short forms like ballads (romances) and letrillas. Popular elements predominate, but with the same stylistic complexity as his learned works.
- Learned Poetry: Includes sonnets, longer odes (canciones mayores), and major works. These are his greatest achievements:
- Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (A mythological poem in octaves).
- Soledades (A lyrical poem composed in silva rhyme, with an epic tone and extension).
- Panegírico al Duque de Lerma.
- Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe (A burlesque mythological poem, similar to the popular tone of a ballad).
Francisco de Quevedo: Master of Conceptismo
Themes in Quevedo’s Poetry
His incisive gaze into the self and deep dive into the human condition. Quevedo’s poetry presents a wide variety of themes, including religious, moral, metaphysical, love, and satirical poems.
Quevedo’s Poetic Style and Devices
- Employment of metaphors.
- Unusual substantivations.
- Recurrent intensifiers.
- Superlatives.
- Wordplay.
- Hyperbole.
- Transference of meaning.
- Creation of new words.
- Antithesis.
- Oxymoron.
- Epithets.
- Paronomasia.
(Cultivated sonnets, ballads, letrillas, and silvas).
Quevedo’s Major Poetic Works and Themes
- Metaphysical Poetry: Meditates on the transience of time, the brevity of life, and the acceptance of death.
- Moral Poetry: Accepts life’s adversities naturally.
- Love Poetry: For Quevedo, love was a way to reconcile with life and even conquer death.
- Religious Poetry.
- Satirical Poetry: Satire serves to express his bitterness and disappointment, and also allows for linguistic wordplay.
- Poetry of Circumstance.