Baroque Poetry: Themes, Styles, and Key Authors

Baroque Poetry: Themes and Innovations

Baroque poetry presents a variety of themes and issues, with innovations and an intensification of Renaissance expressive resources.

Topics and Trends

• Romantic Poetry: Retrieves the Petrarchan model (description of female beauty, frustrated love, mythology).
• Philosophical and Moral Poetry: Addresses disappointment, the brevity and transience of life, the concept of death, the censure of vices, and the pursuit of virtue.
• Religious Poetry: Includes spiritual reflection, repentance, and commemorative poetry.
• Burlesque Poetry: Abounds in parody and humor, even ridicule and personal attacks.

Formal Aspects

• Metrical: Poems and verses less Italianate.
• Style: Elaborate poetic language, extreme acuity, the concept (metaphor, comparison, periphrasis), trends in contrast, complexity, and verbal wit (hyperbaton, parallelism, anaphora, dilogias, pun). The lexicon includes colloquialisms, cultisms, and vulgarisms.

Subordinate Clauses

• Substantive (Noun): (Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Attribute, Noun Complement, Prepositional Complement)
• Adjective: (Adjective Complement, Adjective, Adjective Subordinate, Adjective Subordinate)
• Adverbial:
  • Time (at the time, then)
  • Place (there)
  • Mode (so)
  • Purpose
  • Condition
  • Causes
  • Result
  • Permissive

Circumstantial Clauses

• Time (when)
• Location (where)
• Mode (as)
• Purpose (that)

Direct Object (it's the the), Indirect Object (le les), Attribute, Supplement (think of something)

Mode of Prayer

• Limitation: Reports affirming or denying a fact.
• Questioner: Asks a question.
• Imperative: Directs through orders or requests.
• Exclamatory: Manifests the subjectivity of the speaker.
• Hesitant: Expresses doubt about a fact or possibility.
• Desiderative: Expresses a desire (hopefully).

Key Authors and Their Works

Luis de Góngora

Poetic Works

• Minor Art Poetry: Moorish culture ballads, pastoral, historical, and burlesque, highlighting letrillas.
• Sonnets: Love themes, burlesque, and disappointment about the transience of life.
• Major Poems: Polyphemus and Galatea and Soledades.

Style

Characterized by difficulty, due to mythological allusions, the use of a cultivated lexicon, and the accumulation of rhetorical resources. At the phonic level, emphasizes the use of alliterations and paronomasias. In syntax, uses extensive syntactic forms and complex lexicon. Key resources include: paronomasia, absolute constructions, Greek accusative, bimenbrations, allusive periphrasis, stylistic formulas, and correlations.

Lope de Vega

Poetic Works

• Romances: Moorish, pastoral, and love themes.
• Petrarchan Type: Sonnets, including those in The New Art of Making Plays.
• Religious Poetry: Sacred sonnets and other poems.

His latest publication was Rimas Sacras, which included human and divine poems.

Francisco de Quevedo

Poetic Works

Quevedo wrote both major and minor art poetry.

• Love Poetry: Follows the Petrarchan model, with metaphysical and moral themes.
• Metaphysical and Moral Poetry: Early influences of Stoic and Christian morality, the fleeting nature of life, the deceitfulness of appearances, awareness of death, censure of vices, and defense of virtue.
• Satirical and Burlesque Poetry: Critical of behavior, human types, and social degradation, using myths and heroic poetry.
• Circumstantial or Praise Poems and Descriptive Poems.

Style

In serious or severe poetry: cultism, hyperbolic tone. In satirical and burlesque poetry: metaphors, dilogias, puns, hyperbole, vulgar and colloquial register. Lexical creation and parody are also used.