Góngora and Quevedo: Masters of Spanish Golden Age Verse

Luis de Góngora: Culteranismo

Culteranismo, or Gongorism, was a poetic style that best captured the Renaissance heritage and idealized beauty. It transformed its subjects and exaggerated its rhetorical resources. Cultured poets used lyric poetry with strong formal contrasts, based on sensory perceptions and rhetorical devices. They endowed verse with beautiful and harmonic expression, offering a vision of the world and thus beautifying reality, escaping it, and trying to create perfect, artificial worlds.

Characteristics of Culteranismo

• The use of perfect lines and stanzas achieves great musicality.
• A masterful treatment of metaphor.
• Cultisms (poetic transformation of rhythmic sound).
• Heightening of mythological themes.
• Significant syntactic complication through bold variations of hyperbaton.

The main representative and creator of this trend was the Cordoban Luis de Góngora y Argote. Two styles tend to be distinguished in his writing: the short-meter, traditional, and popular type, and the cultured or culterano style, notably seen in "The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea" and "Solitudes", which exemplify conceptista tendencies.

Francisco de Quevedo: Conceptismo

Conceptismo, peculiar to the 17th century, focused on the accumulation of meaning in poems through intense verbal ellipsis and semantic games.

Stylistic Resources of Conceptismo

• Rhetorical figures of thought: antithesis, paradox, metaphor, hyperbole, etc.
• Word choice: polysemy, etc.
• Phonic games: paronomasias, puns, onomatopoeia, etc.
• Artifices moving syntactic or grammatical categories, forcing the logical order of phrases with hyperbaton.
• Procedures using intensifier words or lexical innovations.

An important figure of Conceptismo was the Madrid-born Francisco de Quevedo (and the poetry of Villegas).

Types of Quevedo's Poetry

• Moral poetry: poems with a moralizing character, often metaphysical, existential, or religious.
• Love poetry: considered the most important of this century in terms of production, often employing the author's paradoxical methods.
• Satirical and burlesque poetry: the most popular and well-known, displaying a large array of rhetorical figures (e.g., letrillas).
• Political poetry: less common, reflecting on Spain and showing his aggressiveness in denouncing corruption.