Spanish Golden Age Masters: Quevedo and Lope de Vega

El Conceptismo: Francisco de Quevedo

He was a man concerned about the affairs of his time, delicate and cruel at the same time. He represents the contrasts of a bitter era. His vision expressed anguish and heartbreak or mockery.

Themes in Quevedo's Poetry

Quevedo's poetry presents a wide variety of themes.

The Conceptista Style

Quevedo's linguistic renewal rests on the acuity and concentration of meanings. Quevedo was a genius of language, and his most characteristic features are:

• Use of metaphors, paradoxes, and intensifiers.
• Resources: Use of repetition, word games, and hyperbole.
• Creating new words (neologisms), antithesis, oxymoron, epithets, paronomasia, and metrics.

Major Works of Quevedo

• Metaphysical Poetry: These are compositions, often sonnets, in which the author meditates on the transience of existence, the brevity of life, or the acceptance of death.
• Moral Poems: These consist mostly of sonnets containing reflections on wealth, power, vice, and virtue. He was a faithful follower of Stoic philosophy, which advocates the natural acceptance of life's adversities.
• Religious Poems: The Catholic faith, with its contempt for earthly life and preparation for death and eternal life, is another source of support that Quevedo used to overcome anguish.
• Love Poems: Many of these tie in with Quevedo's metaphysical concerns. Love was a way to reconcile with life and even beat death. This love poetry is characterized by an attempt to renew the Petrarchan lyric. He took Petrarchan images and modified love motives with hyperbole, metaphors, and personifications.
• Satirical Poems: Satire serves to express his bitterness and disappointment, allowing him to develop his linguistic games. The objects of his satires are the characters of the era, as well as the customs and situations of the moment.

Lope de Vega: The Phoenix of Wits

Félix Lope de Vega Carpio has been called a "freak of nature" for his extraordinary capacity for work and his special poetic sensibility.

Themes in Lope's Work

In this writer's life, work and personal experiences are closely linked, so his compositions focus on topics of a personal nature such as love, God, faith, and feelings.

The Style of Lope de Vega

All the human and divine love, personal and family, that Lope lived was reflected in his verses. His astonishing fertility can be explained by the dire necessity of turning all his experiences into literature:

• Life and Poetry: A close relationship exists between his eventful life and his poetry.
• Naturalness and Expressive Clarity: His form of speech was removed from the artificial.
• Passion for the Romance: He loved poetry of a traditional kind; his romances are characterized by rapid narrative and a lack of unnecessary frills.
• Conversational Simplicity.

Poetic Works of Lope de Vega

His poetry is broad, though it cannot compare to his enormous theatrical output. He cultivated all types of verses but used the romance and the sonnet especially.

• Rimas (Rhymes): As a lyric poet, he transitioned from juvenile ballads to sonnets.
• Rimas Sacras (Sacred Rhymes): A collection of one hundred poems on religious themes.
• Rimas Humanas y Divinas: These were attributed to the pseudonym of the lawyer Tomé de Burguillos.