Spanish Baroque Masters: Góngora and Quevedo's Literary Legacy

Spanish Baroque Masters: Góngora and Quevedo

Luis de Góngora y Argote: Life and Lyric Poetry

Born in Córdoba into a distinguished family, Luis de Góngora was ordained as a priest at age 50.

Góngora's Lyric Forms

• Letrilla: These verses (e.g., on goods, property, or a crying girl) cover a great variety of themes. They maintain the vitality, beauty, grace, and charm typical of this type of verse, but they do not waive the complex language Góngora developed.
• Romance: In these poems (e.g., tied to the hard bench, served in praying the king), the author addresses a wide range of themes and motifs, including love, religious devotion, mythology, and burlesque subjects.
• Sonnets: Góngora is an accomplished author of cultivated poems, such as the sonnets. Themes of love, praise, and disappointment run through many of these compositions. The poems are structurally perfect, though sometimes complicated.

Góngora's Major Narrative Poems

• Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea: Written in 63 stanzas, Góngora, inspired by Ovid's *Metamorphoses*, tells how the Cyclops Polifemo, in love with the nymph Galatea and jealous of the shepherd Acis, kills him by throwing a rock. The nymph transforms her lover into a river.
• The Solitudes (Soledades): The events described are minimal in this poem, beginning with the landfall of a young castaway, scorned in love.

Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas

Francisco de Quevedo: Life and Poetic Themes

Born in Madrid, Quevedo studied in Alcalá and Valladolid. His life activity was closely linked to politics. He was a man of culture and possessed an acute political vision, making him painfully aware of the Spanish decline.

Quevedo's Poetic Categories

• Amatory Poetry: These poems adhere to the conventions of amatory lyric of the era. Quevedo knows how to infuse a feeling and an emotion such that they often transcend far beyond any literary topic.
• Metaphysical Poetry: This category covers topics such as anguish, disappointment, resignation, the transience of life, and death (e.g., “Look at the walls of my country”).
• Moral Poetry: Quevedo adopts the attitude of the Baroque moralist, acting as a critic who castigates and satirizes human foibles (envy, ambition, hypocrisy).
• Satirical Poetry: In his poems, he alludes to 17th-century society (doctors, pharmacists), literary issues (Góngora and Culteranismo), myths (Orpheus and Eurydice), historical figures (Pilate, Nero), and literary heroes (Orlando, El Cid).

Quevedo's Prose Works

• Dreams (Sueños): The work is made up of five dreams (*Dream of Skulls*, *The Sheriff*, *The Pigsty of Pluto*, *The World Within*, *The Visit of the Jokes*). It offers a critique of manners and vices, parading an altarpiece of the most varied types and characters, and providing a burlesque look at Spanish society of his time.
• The Buscón (El Buscón): This is Quevedo's best prose work. It masterfully links and narrates a series of episodes and misfortunes of the protagonist, Pablos (the son of a barber thief and a witch mother). Pablos suffers cruel teasing, ends up in jail for his thefts and misdeeds, and later becomes a comical figure in Toledo. He is a self-made rogue whom Quevedo uses at his whim, demonstrating the author's mastery of language.