Luis de Góngora: Master of Sensory Poetry

Luis de Góngora

Luis de Góngora is the poet of the senses. He was not interested in delving into thought or emotional impact, or recreating the contents of an argument. Instead, he looked for a different aesthetic pleasure.

Characteristics of Góngora's Poetry

• Pictorial Consciousness: A sensory, descriptive poetry that speaks of the taste for a contemplative attitude and the creation of images.
• Landscape: Nature stands as the centerpiece of his work, describing landscapes, objects, animals, etc.
• Blend of High Culture and Popular: Góngora combined elements of high culture and popular culture.
• Satire and Panegyric: He cultivated two types of contradictory poems: satire, which outputs his most critical views, and praise of noble heroes.

Themes

Góngora presents a variety of themes. He cultivates loving, satirical, moral, philosophical, religious, laudatory, circumstantial, and controversial themes.

Style

Góngora's poetry is characterized by great difficulty. The poet uses cultism, hyperbaton, metaphors, and alliteration to avoid direct expression and to enhance the musicality of poetic language. He seeks to create verses with the most extensive and varied expressive possibilities.

• Cultism: The use of words of Latin origin to get away from everyday language.
• Hyperbaton: This is a syntactic device Góngora used to provide flexibility and ease to the language, highlighting the phonetic or coloristic value of a word.
• Mythological Allusions: These work as a step from abstract to concrete symbols.
• Metaphor: Used as a stylization of a formula in which nature has become ugly, uncomfortable, or unpleasant.

Works

Popular Poems

These are compositions in shorter meters, such as romances and letrillas. Popular elements predominate in these poems, but they have the same stylistic complexity as his more cultured works. The best-known romances are varied. The letrillas "Servía en Orán al Rey" and "Ándeme yo caliente y ríase la gente" are satirical compositions in octosyllabic or six-syllable verses, found in the sonnets that are repeated after each stanza.

Religious Poems

Among these poems are sonnets, songs, and larger works:

• Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea
• Solitudes
• Panegyric to the Duke of Lerma
• Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe