Baroque Literature: Themes, Styles, and Poetry

Literary Baroque Aesthetic

The main themes of the Baroque are:

• Epic, romantic, and mythological legacy of the Renaissance
• Religious-political and moral disillusionment removed from the Baroque
• Picaresque and satire, social withdrawal or disenchantment
• Historical or legendary national

Differences Between Renaissance and Baroque

Renaissance:

• Joy of life and reality of this life
• Exaltation
• Optimism in the world and of man
• Harmony, natural elegance, and simplicity
• Balance and life as simplicity

Baroque:

• Problem of fugacity and the shelf
• Anxiety and pessimism
• Devalues human life and human nature
• Contrast and exuberance
• More difficulty and complexity
• Dynamism and movement

Conceptismo and Culteranismo

Conceptismo: Cares more about content with rhetorical figures such as antithesis, paradoxes, puns, witty remarks, and above all, wit.

Culteranismo: Pursues beauty in the way of expression of content and hidden metaphors, effective sensitive hyperbatons, paraphrases, and mythological allusions.

Poetry of the Baroque

The Baroque reached a peak too high and was just matched in the history of Spanish poetry. 17th-century Baroque poetry remained in continuity and rapture of the themes, rhetorical forms, and meters of the previous century.

Subjects

The subjects were evolving from a Renaissance to a Baroque attitude:

1. Love: Began to have a sense of transcendent vision, conserving courtly Petrarchan beloved enemy and images, but not as something ephemeral but as an eternal feeling that should last beyond death.

2. Nature: Transformation into a moralistic view on all the lost beauty of the rose, symbolizing the condition of human fugacity.

3. Mythology: Charging a great landmark in two respects: the case of noble beauty that could become rhetorical games or become a parody.

Trends in "Learned Poetry"

The poetry continued with cultured Baroque and Renaissance heritage of Italianate poetry. It maintained its outstanding achievements (hendecasyllable) (sonnet, song). Poets formed two distinct groups that broke:

1. Classical balance between content and expression (as in Lope de Vega).

2. Those who maintained the aesthetic ideal of naturalness and selection of Renaissance classicism.