Luis de Góngora: Baroque Poetry, Culteranismo and the Polyphemus and Galatea Controversy

Luis de Góngora: Themes and Style

Góngora wrote romances with villancicos and love themes, Moorish subjects, pastorals, captives, satire, religious poems, fables and the romance Pyramus and Thisbe, where mythological parody mocks classical myths and popular customs. His romances combined the lyric and the epic, drawing on mythological and popular sources.

Sonnets

His sonnets treat loving Petrarchan themes, moral reflections, fables and religious subjects. Polyphemus and Galatea (1613) narrates in octaves the story of love between the shepherd nymph Galatea and Acis, and the tragic intervention of the Cyclops Polyphemus, built on a series of oppositions: beauty and brutality, delicacy and violence, and so on.

Soledades

Góngora's Soledades were planned in four parts, corresponding to the stages of life (adolescence, youth, maturity and old age), but only the First and Second Solitudes were written. The poem is an extraordinary accumulation of allusions and rhetorical and mythological resources, and it demands hard, careful reading. Góngora's work provoked the first great literary controversy, dividing his detractors and defenders over his style.

Style

Góngorine style avoided common and vulgar words. Petrarchan images were reworked in a highly selected lexicon characterized by Culteranismo: the use of words with a musical meaning, abundant periphrasis and circumlocution, and marked syntactic inversions (hipérbaton). Cultist devices include correlation, distribution and accumulation, and the poem keeps a sustained correspondence between the two parts of the poem, which are recognized at the end.

Lope de Vega and Popular Poetry

Lope de Vega drew on popular forms, romances and canciones, which he disseminated in his theatrical works. Poems were published separately: Rimas, sonetos and romances recognizing amorous and mythological, historical and biblical subjects, among others.

Sacred Rhymes

Sacred rhymes: poetry with a religious tone and appearance. Human rhymes and themes of divine licence, voiced through a fictitious character, combine poetry with comic and burlesque content.

Style of Quevedo and Love Poetry

Quevedo's style is characterized by conciseness, with a style quite different from the final Gongorine manner. In love poetry, Quevedo cultivates the Petrarchan tradition, heightening the contrasts and limits of suffering. He also writes the famous poem "Sings alone Lisi". Concepts relating love and death appear: love is a constant source of suffering, but it can also conquer death.

Satirical and Burlesque Poetry

Satirical and burlesque poems are a major part of his output. Religious poetry: a constant presence of repentance and the figure of the crucified Christ.

Metaphysical and Moral Poetry

In metaphysical poems, a philosophical view, Stoic and Christian, underlies the verses, with a pessimistic tone and the frequent motto cotidie morimur. In moral poems, the evils of the time are treated in relation to the human condition.

Rhetorical Devices

Opposition resources: abundant use of oxymoron, antithesis and hyperbaton. Habitual use of hyperbole, especially in frequent satirical passages. Use of terms with fire-related meanings, associated with metaphors for love and passion, both positive and negative in sense.

Lexical and Grammatical Features

Lexical creations: adjectives used as nouns, such as nose, headsman and scribe. Use of verbs or adverbs as nouns, neologisms such as noses, diabliposa and desnacer, and changes of phrase such as yorar (to weep) for pitchers and hablar (to speak) for mules.