Luis de Góngora: Master of Baroque Poetry

Luis de Góngora

Unlike other authors such as Lope de Vega and Quevedo, Luis de Góngora's writing is almost exclusively poetic. He cultivated poetry both in its traditional forms and in the popular underground cult. In both cases, the tone of his poetry can range from the most serious, beautiful, and noble to the cartoonish, humorous, festive, and burlesque.

Letrillas and Romances

Góngora is an accomplished poet in both types of compositions.

• His letrillas and ballads (Da bienes Fortuna; Lloraba la niña; Hermana Marica, among others) cover a great variety of themes. They maintain the vitality, beauty, grace, and charm typical of this type of verse, but Góngora does not renounce the elaborate language, expressiveness, and artifice of his cultivated style.
• In the romances (Amarrado al duro banco; Servía en Orán al Rey; Angélica y Medoro, etc.), the author addresses a wide range of themes and motifs: love, religious, mythological, burlesque, etc.

Sonnets

Góngora is also an accomplished author of cultivated poems, like sonnets. Love, praise, and disappointment run through many of these compositions. Some are as successful as Mientras por competir con tu cabello, Ilustre y hermosísima María, La dulce boca que a gustar convida, and so on.

The Cordovan poet's sonnets have a perfect and sometimes complicated structure. Góngora shows mastery of formal perfection, artifice, and all the baggage of culteranismo lyric.

The poet seeks to create a distinct and consummate poetic language of full verbal beauty. He makes ample use of violent hipérbatos, lengthy statements, metaphors, metonymy, antithesis, adjectives, cultism, mythological allusions, and so on. Hence, often, his poetry, while bright, colorful, and dazzling, is complex, secretive, and sometimes difficult to read.

Longer Poems

Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea

It is written in 63 stanzas. Góngora, who is inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, tells how the Cyclops Polyphemus, 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 myth is already in the Odyssey (from the ninth century BC, attributed to Homer) and was recreated thoroughly and diversely in Spanish and Italian Renaissance poetry. The issue also attracted the poets of the Baroque.

These poets, who appreciate contrasts and shadows, know how to see the contradiction of the giant Polyphemus, who is monstrous and fierce but can also be delicate and tender: tiernamente fiero or gigantescamente tierno.

The originality of the Cordovan poet does not lie, then, in history but in the perfect construction and modulation of the poem and the language, typically Góngora.

The Solitudes

The events described are minimal in this poem, beginning with the landfall of a young castaway, scorned by love.

Góngora poured into his silvas his most elaborate and exuberant language, sumptuous and culterano, of poetry in all its forms, although, as a result, the lines are also difficult to understand.

The play, which is dedicated to the Duke of Béjar, remained incomplete. It appears that Góngora had intended to structure the poem in four parts. However, he only wrote two solitudes, and the second was left unfinished.