Góngora & Quevedo: Baroque Poetry and Picaresque Fiction
Luis de Góngora
His work exhibits a full range of poetic tones. It can range from the most serious, beautiful, and noble to the comic, the humorous, and the burlesque.
Letrillas and Romances
Letrilla: thematic. They maintain variety, aliveness, beauty, grace, and a cultivated style.
Romances: diversity of themes and motifs: love, religious, mythological, and burlesque.
Sonnets
Learned poems that address topics such as love, praise, perfection, and the complicated desengaño (disillusionment). The sonnet poet seeks structure and the creation of a distinct, consummate poetic language. He uses hyperbaton, long enunciations, metonymy, antithesis, abundant adjectives, and other rhetorical devices.
Longer Poems
Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea: written in 63 stanzas and inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. It tells how the Cyclops Polyphemus is in love with the nymph Galatea and, jealous of the shepherd Acis, kills him by throwing a rock. The nymph turns her lover into a river.
The Solitudes (Las Soledades): concerns the arrival on earth of neglected loves. This shipwrecked work is dedicated to the Duke of Béjar and remained incomplete.
Francisco de Quevedo
A famous poet in his lifetime, Quevedo wrote sonnets, ballads, letrillas, songs, and epistolary poems. His works range from the bold to the grotesque and the sublime.
Poetic Themes
He valued artifice and the beauty of language; his verses infuse feelings and emotions that transcend mere literary topic. His themes include metaphysical anguish, disappointment, the transience of life, and the presence of death. Moral poetry adopts a posture of moral criticism; Baroque satire attacks human foibles and lashes them.
Satirical Poetry
- Characters of seventeenth-century society
- Writers and literary issues, especially culteranismo and Góngora
- Myths
- Historical characters
- Literary characters and heroes
Prose Work
Los Sueños (The Dreams): examples include The Dream of Skulls, The Outsmarting, Las Razones de Platón, The World Within, and The Visit of the Jokes. These pieces critique manners and vices, portraying various types and characters. The tone is burlesque but also anxious, disappointed, and sharply critical of Spanish society at the time.
The Buscón
The Buscón is considered Quevedo's best prose work and a culmination of the picaresque novel. The narrative masterfully links a series of episodes and misfortunes of the protagonist.
Don Pablos: His parents are of low social standing (a barber who is a thief and a mother accused of witchcraft). At the University of Alcalá and later in Madrid he suffers mockery. He leaves, ends up in jail, is freed, and attempts to pretend to be of higher rank by marrying Don Diego's cousin; a comic player cheats him in Toledo and Seville. The novel ends with his intention to embark for the Indies, but he never improves his moral condition.
Don Pablos, a rogue who echoes Quevedo's merciless treatment of characters, is a puppet in the hands of his author. Quevedo shakes and abuses him physically and morally, as he does with other characters.