Spanish Golden Age Poets: Themes, Styles, and Key Works

Spanish Golden Age Poets: Themes and Styles

Garcilaso de la Vega

Poetic Themes and Evolution

• Love, often expressed with melancholy and sadness due to frustration or unrequited feelings.
• Connection between love and nature, relating to the locus amoenus theme, reflecting the inner world as a poetic refuge from pain.
• Other themes include friendship, fate, fortune, and the mastery of passions.

Stylistic Development

• Early Petrarchan poems show influence from cancionero lyric and the Valencian poet Ausiàs March, characterized by a more intense and dominant use of traditional lyric resources.
• From 1532, increased contact with Petrarchan poetry led to the incorporation of classical genres like the ode, elegy, epistle, and eclogue into his work.

The Eclogues

Garcilaso's three eclogues feature shepherds expressing their love complaints in an idealized natural setting. Common themes include love and suffering from loss or unrequited affection.

His style is characterized by natural expression, emphasizing the use of epithets (especially from 1532), metaphors, personifications, and hyperbaton.

San Juan de la Cruz

Core Theme

The central theme of San Juan de la Cruz's poetry is the mystical union of the soul with God.

Fundamental Allegorical Poems

His key poems are written allegorically, portraying the soul as the beloved seeking and ultimately finding the Beloved, who is God. His three major poems are:

• Dark Night of the Soul: Describes the soul's journey (the beloved) through the night, guided by the light of love, to meet the Beloved (God).
• Living Flame of Love: Uses metaphors of profane love to describe mystical ecstasy.
• Spiritual Canticle: Structured like an eclogue, it depicts the Beloved (soul) abandoned by the Beloved (God), searching for Him guided by nature's signs, eventually meeting and uniting. It is inspired by the biblical Song of Songs.

Fray Luis de León

Poetic Context and Themes

Fray Luis de León's poetry coincided with the rise of spiritual literature in the second half of the 16th century. His work includes:

• Original Poems: Approximately 23 original poems, mostly composed in lira stanzas.
• Themes: Primarily moral, with some religious poems. His sources include classical poetry (Horace and Virgil) and biblical texts. He also shows influence from Neoplatonic and Stoic philosophy, which advocated overcoming passions to achieve peace and serenity.
• Beatus Ille: He frequently employs the theme of beatus ille, referring to a retired life in harmony with nature, rejecting worldly concerns and anxieties, particularly the desire for wealth, power, greed, and lust. The locus amoenus serves as an ideal setting for poetry, music, and peace.

Poetic Style

• Use of metaphors related to nature.
• Repetition of words.
• Anaphoras.
• Latinate cultisms.
• Hyperbaton.
• Polysyndeton and asyndeton.

Prose Works

His prose works are known for their clarity and beauty, influenced by humanist and Augustinian ideas and values:

• Exposition of the Song of Songs
• Exposition of the Book of Job
• The Perfect Wife
• The Names of Christ (his most important prose work)