Baroque Literature: Key Characteristics and Major Authors
The Baroque Period
The Baroque era is characterized by melancholy, disappointment, and a contempt for earthly things. It is highly ornate, complex, and filled with intricate ornamentation. During this time, scientific progress stagnated, making way for a resurgence of superstition and religious power.
Baroque Features
- Contrast: A tension between the attitude of disillusionment with life and a desire for worldly enjoyments.
- Aesthetic Imbalance: A taste for inordinate exaggeration and difficult language used to avoid censorship.
- Creative Originality: A focus on personal ingenuity and the artist's unique vision.
- Excess: A general tendency toward exaggeration and stark contrasts.
The central theme of the Baroque is disappointment.
Literary Trends
- Culteranismo: Works that are very long but contain little plot, utilizing difficult, highly adorned language featuring hyperbaton, metaphors, Latinisms, cultisms, and excessive adjectives.
- Conceptismo: Short works where the argument is paramount, filled with puns and wordplay (dilogías).
- Exaggerated Realism (Picaresque): Focuses on the most unpleasant and crude aspects of life.
17th Century Poetry
Key features include:
- Love: Often presented with a bitter tone.
- Nature: The Platonic vision is lost, becoming purely decorative.
- Mythology: Used primarily as an ornamental element.
- Disappointment: The most significant issue, serving as a warning about the expiration of ephemeral beauty and earthly glories.
- Comic and Burlesque Themes: Used to address difficult subjects.
Poetic forms from the Renaissance remain in use, including seguidillas, carols, songs, ballads, sonnets, silva, and the lira.
Major Authors
Luis de Góngora y Argote
The primary representative of Culteranismo. His work is divided into two types:
- Popular Poetry: Easier, utilizing sonnets and letrillas to address love, satire, and praise of the powerful.
- Complex Poetry: Longer, sophisticated works including masterpieces such as Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea—the story of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who, enraged by the love between the nymph Galatea and the shepherd Acis, kills his rival with a rock, transforming him into a river—and Solitudes.
Lope de Vega
His poetry is more accessible and personal, often autobiographical. His work is defined by optimism and vitality. Notable works include the narrative poem The Gatomaquia (featuring alley cat battles) and his collections Rhymes, Sacred Rhymes, and Human and Divine Rhymes.
Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas
The highest representative of Conceptismo. His themes center on contrasts, mockery, and criticism. His poetry is categorized into three types:
- Philosophical or Moral: Dense works with death as the principal theme.
- Love Poetry: Deals with emotion and passion.
- Satirical Poetry: Often eschatological and intentionally rude.