Renaissance Poetry in Spain: Forms, Themes, and Key Poets

Renaissance Poetry — Formal Innovations

Renaissance poetry

Formal innovations in the Renaissance

The main novelty was the use of the formal hendecasyllable of Italian heritage, sometimes combined with seven-syllable lines. With these verses the poets constructed characteristic Renaissance forms:

• Lira: a stanza combining hendecasyllables and heptasyllables (often five and seven-syllable lines).
• Octava real (octave reale): an eight-line stanza of hendecasyllables.
• Estancia: stanzas combining hendecasyllables and heptasyllables.
• Chained tercets: tercets of hendecasyllables linked together in sequence.

Along with them were also used two important types of poems:

• Sonnet. Poem composed of two quartets and two tercets.
• Silva. Poem composed of an unlimited number of hendecasyllables and seven-syllable (heptasyllable) lines.

Evolution of poetry in Spain

In the early sixteenth century, Spain introduced the Italian poetic model. Petrarchan poetry persisted throughout the century, but in the second half of the sixteenth century a religious literature emerged, most notably poems of ascetic and mystical content.

Ascetic: Ascetic poetry insists on the purification of the soul through the removal of earthly pleasures to attain spiritual perfection.

Mystical: Mystical poetry consists of the union of the soul with God in human life. The mystical experience is expressed through three ways: purification (the soul is freed from earthly attachment), illumination (the soul experiences the divine presence), and union (the soul unites with God).

Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso de la Vega is the prototype of the noble courtier: a man of arms and letters, soldier and poet. Spain introduced the Petrarchan model and Garcilaso successfully adapted it.

The most important theme of Garcilaso's poetry is the loving complaint caused by the rejection or death of the beloved. To show his pain, he composed poems in the first person or imagined stories featuring pastoral or mythological characters, through whose voice he expresses his own feelings.

Ascetical and mystical poetry

The poets of the second half of the sixteenth century reconciled Renaissance poetic forms with religious themes.

Fray Luis de León

Fray Luis de León, an Augustinian friar and professor at the University of Salamanca, is the author of poems with religious content related to the classical world, and he used Renaissance poetic forms.

His verses extol the greatness of God as reflected in the universe, and propose a model of life: to turn away from selfish pleasures and live simply, in contact with nature. This idea aligns with another classical motif present in the Renaissance: the beatus ille ('the happy one').

San Juan de la Cruz

San Juan de la Cruz, a Carmelite monk, collected his religious experiences in his poems. To explain his mystical experiences he uses the imagery of human love and portrays the soul as a young woman (the beloved or bride) who yearns for the love of her lover or husband (God).

His longer poems — Dark Night of the Soul, Living Flame of Love, and Spiritual Canticle — represent one of the peaks of world literature.