A Poetics Sacralized: Luis de Góngora's Soledades as Religious Rhetoric in Luis de Tejeda's "Romance Sobre su vida"

During the 1610s, the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) composed and circulated at court his most ambitious and experimental poems: the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades.¹ These poems received some acclaim at the time, but they generated much more hostility: characterized by intense erudition, densely packed tropes, and convoluted, latinized syntax, Góngora's innovative style sparked a literary firestorm the likes of which had never been seen before in Castilian culture.² Góngora's detractors universally condemned the use of violent hyperbaton and wordy, metaphoric overlay, as such techniques created too much textual and interpretive difficulty, and thus too strongly contested poetry's traditional role in clearly communicating aesthetic, social, and moral objectives to readers and listeners. Though the anti-gongoristas appreciated a certain degree of textual challenge, they believed that Góngora's work sacrificed a necessary level of conceptual coherence for the sake of sensational techniques and tropes.³

Many of Góngora's most ardent detractors targeted his unconventional use of heroic and lofty poetic genres for the expression of mundane themes. Specifically, critics assailed Góngora's use of the revered octava real for mythological storytelling in the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, and also lambasted him for using the elegant silva in order to express the simple, terrestrial travels of the protagonist peregrino in the Soledades. Indeed, Góngora's poems do not merely attire worldly themes with the cadences and rhymes of elevated genres: the Fábula and the Soledades convey a materialistic, earth-centered worldview in which conventional markers of Christian symbolism and morality are not immediately evident. In an age when the Spanish literary establishment strongly upheld the Horatian principle of harnessing moral instruction to aesthetic objectives (especially in lengthy texts written in serious verse forms), Góngora's poetry proved not only challenging and experimental, but downright cryptic and contrarian. Góngora's signature style developed over the course of decades (from the early 1580s through the 1610s and 1620s) and generally mirrored lexical and stylistic trends in Castilian poetry, but Góngora's detractors nevertheless saw the poetic experiments as a declaration of war against accepted literary conventions, linguistic standards, thematic expectations, and didactic norms. Góngora's most trenchant critics pounced on this last feature, and suggested that the absence of a Christian perspective in Góngora's poems was equivalent to an anti-Christian one.⁴ As John Beverley notes, the poet Francisco de Quevedo accused Góngora of being a converso, and the commentator Francisco Cascales referred to Góngora as the "Mahoma de la poesía española" ("Sobre" 35). Ultimately, in the 1610s and 1620s and even beyond, for many powerful members of Spain's literary elite, the formal and structural characteristics of Góngora's unique style instantly evoked a non-Christian, and at times heterodox, worldview: "Por haber elevado el juego lingüístico ingenioso como centro del gusto poético, no directamente relacionado con la moral o la doctrina, se pensaba que Góngora había producido un formalismo funcionalmente ateo, que su poesía era babélica" (Beverley, "Sobre" 35). In effect, despite the support of a small constellation of poets and apologists, gongorism was widely seen as a pernicious literary idiom, a diabolic babel, and a "foreign" discourse associated with themes that undermined Christianity and, consequently, Spanish identity.

As the Soledades circulated in manuscript form during the 1610s and 1620s, some peninsular writers took an active but limited interest in imitating and reworking the poem's language and themes.⁵ In the late 1620s and 1630s, after Góngora's death, linguistic and thematic features of gongorism entered mainstream Spanish writing: Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and other writers first cultivated gongorism in order to mock it, but later wound up dabbling in it for many other literary uses. Other poets, such as the playwrights Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, co-opted gongorism and helped to make it popular and...