Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice

Almost thirty years ago Arthur Terry, at that time Professor of Spanish at Queen’s University, Belfast, published with Pergamon Press a highly original anthology of Spanish poetry (1500–1700) in two parts: Part I (1500–1580), copyrighted in 1965, and Part II (1580–1700), in 1968. Retiring in 1993, after twenty years as Professor of Literature at the University of Essex, he has now published a critical and historical study of the poetry of the latter period. He has taken into account the many new and better editions and the important critical studies published in the interim; his bibliographical references reach the year 1988, shortly after which we may assume that his new book went to press. More aware than ever of the importance of classical rhetoric and the concepts of imitation and decorum in Renaissance poetics, he emphasizes historical distance and the dangers of anachronism, of appreciating Baroque poetry wrongly, from a post-Romantic point of view (p. xii):

Conversely, what we might come to value in poems of the period is precisely the sense of ‘otherness’, the fact that such fine poetry has been written on assumptions which actively question our own ideas about the nature of poetic writing.

In his first chapter Arthur Terry (hereafter, AT) provides background information concerning the Italianate and the cancionero traditions in sixteenth-century Spanish poetry; the different geographical centers of literature, especially the royal court in Madrid; the function of patronage and literary academies; the impact of the Counter-Reformation; Herrera’s Petrarchan synthesis and his poetic language. A final section argues for Cervantes’s originality as a poet. AT sees the Galatea as another sort of Petrarchan synthesis, a casuistry of love, in which seventy poems, alternating with prose, provide introspective stories of sentimental situations. Altogether different are Cervantes’s two brilliant satirical sonnets, evoking the sack of Cadiz and Philip II’s catafalque in Seville.

Chapter 2 (“Theory and practice”) provides us with a view of the analogical, hierarchical micro/macrocosmos that Renaissance poets took for granted, as Rosemond Tuve and Michel Foucault have argued. Horace’s two basic functions of poetry (prodesse et dilectare) were combined with ideas from Aristotle and Plato and with classical rhetoric; literary decorum, the ideology of a hierarchical society, prescribed three levels of style, corresponding to three social classes. AT is more sceptical about the importance of “ut pictura poesis,” a much-used Horatian phrase implying that verbal or mental pictures have an objective stability comparable to that of paintings; he prefers concepts to images, intellectual metaphors based on the affinity of things, their cosmic relationships to one another. Herrera is seen as Spain’s major sixteenth-century theorist of poetry: eclectic, basically neo-Platonic, with a new appreciation of culto language and of metaphor as producing aesthetic pleasure.

Although not inclined to use the word “Baroque,” AT has no doubt that there is a distinct, more difficult post-Renaissance style, characterized in Spain by culteranismo (seen in a Góngora sonnet: Latinisms of vocabulary and syntax, classical allusions, metaphors built on established similes) and by conceptismo (seen in a Quevedo sonnet: a rhetorically constructed self using wit to provoke intellectual surprise). The major theorist of this new style is, of course, Gracián, whose treatise on the nature and function of wit explains the beauty of complexity, ingenio as a special mental process, an aesthetic experience.

The history proper of seventeenth-century Spanish poetry consists of seven chapters: one each devoted to the four major poets (Góngora, Lope, Quevedo, Sor Juana), to epic poetry, and to two groups of secondary poets. The four major poets have been intensively studied for a number of years, and AT’s readings of individual poems by them add new personal insights and appreciations without radically altering established views. More original is his ranking of the secondary poets, with readings of some of their major poems; the first group (“Between two centuries”) includes Medrano, Arguijo, Rioja, Fernández de Andrada, the...