Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and exercises for Latin for Baccalaureate

Lyrical Learned Catalan

Provence emerged in troubadour poetry, where a lyrical character was created by known authors. Their compositions for song were released by the minstrels. The troubadours created a fine art that was difficult: "The verse was based on the number of syllables and ought to be strictly consonant rhyme."

Genres of Provençal Poetry

• Cansó: Composition of loving nature, always from male to female, reflecting feudal ideology. Love relationships are treated as feudal relations between lord and vassal.
• Sirventes: Was employed as an expression of anger, personal attack...

The Concept of Courtly Love

Like the troubadours, who were intimately linked with the courts, they had a decisive influence on their work. Courtesy, in opposition...

16th Century Spanish Poetry: Themes and Forms

The 16th century marked a significant period for Spanish poetry. Traditional and lyrical ballads, while often oral, were also widely disseminated through common songbooks. A key date in this era is 1543, which saw the introduction of new poetic genres and themes. These included classical motifs such as:

• Carpe diem (Seize the day)
• Collige, virgo, rosas (Gather, maiden, the roses)
• The Golden Mean
• Beatus ille (Blessed is he)

Mythology also played a prominent role. The predominant theme was love, influenced by philosophy and often detached from purely carnal appetites. Love was depicted as a force that could improve individuals, but also as a source of pain and frustration for the unrequited lover. Common...

The Generation of '27: A Literary Movement

The Generation of '27 was a group of Spanish poets united by friendship and shared literary tastes. They benefited from the experience of modern art and the avant-garde, revolutionizing Spanish poetry while building upon tradition.

Origins and Influences

The commemoration of the tercentenary of Góngora in 1927 served as a catalyst for the group's formation. These poets, all with strong academic backgrounds, began under the guidance of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Ortega y Gasset.

Impact of the Spanish Civil War

The Civil War led to exile for many, often without return, and in some cases, to death, as happened to Lorca.

Key Themes in Their Work

The main themes explored by these poets include man's relationship...

Joan Roís de Corella (1435? - 1497)

Joan Roís de Corella, probably born in Gandia, belonged to a noble family that maintained close relations with the poet Ausiàs March. He was intended for military studies, but ultimately pursued religious ones. Despite his religious vocation, he had several relationships and a son and a daughter, Isabel Martínez Vera.

Works

Given the thematic diversity of his prose, it is classified into four groups:

• Love-themed
• Religious-themed
• Mythological-themed
• Works of circumstance

Style

Corella's prose is rhetorical, a new Latinizing style that was called *Valencian prose*. He was an aristocrat, a writer, and a teacher of theology, with extensive and varied literary works that include both prose and poetry.

Poetry

As a poet,...

Petrarchism and its Influence

Petrarch's songs had a huge significance and a decisive influence on later lyrics, both for their subjects and their forms, to the point of constituting an entire style or way of making poetry that is called Petrarchism.

Spanish Poetry in the 15th and 16th Centuries

In the 15th century, there was both learned poetry and folk poetry. A good example of the first is court poetry and songs, which mainly used octosyllables. In the 16th century, both types of poetry continued. Learned poetry was influenced by the popular song.

Features of Italian Poetry in Spanish Literature

• Complete and thorough metric renovation in Spanish poetry.
• Major innovation: the hendecasyllable.
• Idealization of the beloved and intense expression of

Luis Cernuda

Under the influence of Surrealism, Cernuda abandons metrical regularity. Visionary poetic images abound in his work. These images are also used to express love, which excludes homosexual choices.

Forbidden Pleasures

This work maintains dream images and incorporates prose poems. It is a voluntarily hermetic book. Cernuda attacks repressive society and defends rebellion against the rules, which allows access to forbidden pleasures.

Donde Habite El Olvido

In the poems of Donde Habite El Olvido, the pain intensifies. The duality between the angel and the devil represents the duality between reality and desire. However, desire is the source of creation because it represents the need to create, live, and love.

Jorge Guillén

Jorge Guillén...

Modernism in Poetry: A Literary Movement

Modernism was a poetic movement that emerged in the Castilian tongue during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Key Themes of Modernism

• The legacy of Romanticism (existential malaise, tendency to escape reality).
• Modernism's own themes: love and eroticism, cosmopolitanism, refined, aristocratic, and exquisite aesthetics.
• The Latin American world.

Modernist Metrics

Modernism brought a metric revolution, with a tendency to lengthen the poetic line. The Alexandrine verse (14 syllables) became the most common, accepting the concept of tonic and unstressed syllables combined to create rhythm and musicality.

Among Peninsular modernists, the taste for popular verses remained, including:

• Verse
• Streak
• Soleá
• Romance

Duration

Cicero's Works

Treaties of Rhetoric

Cicero wrote The Speaker, a three-book work featuring Licinius Crassus and Mark Antony, renowned speakers of the 2nd century BC. Through these characters and two others, Cicero explains the qualities of a good orator. The book proposes that all speeches should be divided into distinct parts:

• Exordium: The introduction of the topic, where the speaker aims to gain public sympathy.
• Exposition or Narration: Presentation of the facts relevant to the speech.
• Argumentation: The speaker provides arguments to justify their intervention or attack the opponent.
• Conclusion or Peroration: A final summary where the speaker reiterates their main points and seeks to persuade the audience.

Cicero also wrote several dialogues, notably...

"I Ask for Peace and the Word: Fidelity" by Blas de Otero

This analysis focuses on the structure and commentary of the poem, based on parallelism across three stanzas. Each stanza features a concessive clause followed by a conclusion.

• First Stanza: "I in Man"

  The concessive value ("although") leads to the conclusion: "ye believed." The poet believes in humanity, although he has witnessed blind hatred that mistreats fellow beings. The text includes metonymies ("back," "souls," "Spain"), the metaphor "shattered," and the personification "blinded." The abrupt, overlapping lines transmit continuity between lines 4 and 5, conveying the idea of Spain advancing. Alliteration of the gerund "chipped" expresses the feeling of pain from lashes.

• Second Stanza:

A more formidable objection to the plan of the book might be that I have taken too little into account the historical backgrounds of the poems I have discussed. An adequate answer to this charge will have to be furnished by the book itself, but I should like to forestall some misapprehensions, here and now. If literary history has not been emphasized in the pages that follow, it is not because I discount its importance, or because I have failed to take it into account. It is rather that I have been anxious to see what residuum, if any, is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix.

The temper of our times is strongly relativistic. We have had impressed upon us the necessity for reading a poem in terms of its historical context,...