The Aesthetics of Spanish Baroque Poetry: Góngora and Culteranismo
Baroque Poetry: Themes and Characteristics
Culteranismo pursued beauty and formal expression, often obscuring the content. It resorted to sensory metaphors, **hyperbaton**, periphrasis, cultisms, and mythological allusions.
Topics in Baroque Poetry
Regarding the topics, two distinct sections emerged:
- The Main Themes of the Renaissance: Love, nature, and mythology, developed with a logical evolution.
- Moralizing Themes: These reflected on the brevity of life and the transience of earthly things, viewing existence allegorically as a dream, deception, and falsehood.
The Baroque Attitude Towards Renaissance Themes
Renaissance themes were developed in accordance with the Baroque attitude:
- Love acquired a sense of transcendence. Poets retained the courtly vision of the beloved as an enemy and the Petrarchan images of “light, flame, burning…” but interpreted them not as ephemeral, but as an eternal feeling that should endure beyond death.
- Nature was transformed into a moralistic view: the loss of its beauty, especially the rose, symbolized the transience of the human condition.
- Mythology served as a benchmark in two ways: either as a subject that could ennoble beauty, or as a rhetorical game that, through expressive contradiction, could become parody.
Core Themes of Disillusionment and Pessimism
Baroque themes were the result of disillusionment and pessimism:
- Time and transience, the brevity of life, and the presence of death were effective creative engines.
- The dream became a symbol of life and death, reflecting the double conception of existence as both a reality and an appearance.
- The Mirror, meanwhile, became a symbol of disappointment, a sign of stoic wisdom that looked upon life as despised deception and falsehood.
- The problem of Spain, which summarized the political atmosphere and gravity, was presented through corrosive criticism or satire.
Trends in Learned Baroque Poetry
Learned Baroque poetry continued the legacy of Renaissance meters and maintained its achievements, among which the hendecasyllable verse (suitable for lyrical expression) and the sonnet and song (as peculiar strophic poems) are highlighted. The poets, in turn, formed two very distinct groups:
- Those who broke the classical balance between content and expression (i.e., Culteranismo and Conceptismo), and those who, like Lope de Vega, harmonized both trends.
- Those who maintained the aesthetic ideal of naturalness and self-selection of Renaissance classicism.
In Baroque poetry, three trends are generally distinguished: Culteranismo, Conceptismo, and Classical.
Culteranismo: The Poetry of Luis de Góngora
Culterano poets conceived the lyric as a complex of **strong formal contrasts**, based on sensory perceptions and **risky rhetoric**. They broke the balance between form and content, focusing on a beautiful and harmonious expression to give a beautified view of the world, thus escaping from reality. It was a way of trying to create artificial and perfect worlds through aesthetic and sensory means.
Among its most notable features are listed:
- Perfect use of lines and stanzas for high musicality.
- Magistral treatment of metaphor.
- Impeccable poetic transformation of language by using learned words and rhythmic sound.
- Strengthening of mythological themes.
- Exquisite syntactic complication with bolder hyperbaton variants.
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.