Spanish Baroque Poetry: Culteranismo, Conceptismo & Themes
Eighteenth-Century Lyric
Topics:
Metaphysical poetry: music, moral and religious (transcendent themes). Many authors reflect their concerns and insights on the design disillusioned with life and ways of overcoming barroca. Themes of anxiety: the fear of death, the transience of life ... Quevedo.
Love Poetry
Love poetry. It was very abundant. Lope.
- Surviving the themes of courtly love and Petrarchan (more tension).
- Love is an unattainable ideal that brings tears, pain and death.
- There is a stream of Horatian inspiration in combining moral intention and the feeling of love (beatus ille).
Satirical and Burlesque Poetry
Satirical poetry and burlesque. The term defines satirical poetry that has a moral root and burlesque, which answers a conformist attitude or purpose of these parodic satires. The subject can be a portrait, specifically a visio, or the customs of the time. Quevedo and Góngora.
Form and Shape
Shape: Mixing with other popular elements and cultish worship elements.
Métrica
Métrica. They have a wide metrical selection:
- Italian verses (hendecasyllables and combinations thereof).
- Castilian verses (octosyllables) in quatrains, quintillas and letrillas. Widespread use of the gloss and the décima.
- Romances: a taste for romances was accentuated and many of them were written.
Expressive Resources
Expressive resources. The poetry is full of expressive resources: metaphors, paradoxes, cultismos, puns, etc.
Culteranismo and Conceptismo
Culteranismo
Culteranismo: This movement is named after one of its most characteristic traits: the use of cultismos. Its creator and main exponent was Luis de Góngora.
The main features of the culteran aesthetic are:
- Plentiful use of cultismos that contribute significant expressiveness and musical value.
- Latinate syntax, highly complex and ornate vocabulary.
- Use of rhetorical devices such as metaphors, alliteration, hipérbatos (hyperbaton) and other figures.
Conceptismo
Conceptismo: This current uses a poetic style based on witty and surprising ideas. Its main proponents were Quevedo and Gracián.
The most characteristic features of this stream are:
- Use of logical, rationalist trends: ideas are valued over emotional expression; the meaning is sought, not solely the emotion.
- Creation of novel compositions and word derivations; unexpected turns of phrase and compact expression.
- Employment of resource-rich rhetoric: metaphors, antithesis, oxymoron, and other concise, striking devices.