Lope Defending Poetry vs. Lope Writing Poetry: The Conflicts of "donde habla amor puro"

Lope's defense of poetry, Cuestión del honor debido a la poesía, has attracted little attention from scholars, due in no small part to the difficulty of reading a text that appears overburdened with excessive catalogs and recondite allusions, but also to its deceptive patina of counter-reformation moralism resolutely displayed in the form of a rhetorical exercise. It is my reading that Lope, rather than merely adopting panegyric convention aligned with moral conservatism, entertained more pragmatic motives stemming from a need to justify Spanish amorous poetry under insistent moral attack, and more significantly to claim validity for his own love poetry ("donde habla amor puro" Epistolario III: 330). Lope's Platonism both in defending and writing poetry was compromised, however, when it came into conflict with his literary embraces of eros and the imposition of a Scholastic-Aristotelian psychology. In effect Lope's "discurso" can be considered a conventional yet ambivalent early reflection on poetics, rhetoric and literary theory.¹

To understand Lope's motivation for undertaking a defense of poetry it helps to place it not only in the tradition of Spanish encomia (Alfonso de Baena, Prólogo Cancionero de Baena; Marqués de Santillana, Proemio y Carta and later Spanish examples) but also in the broader tradition of Boccaccio's Geneologia deorum gentilium (defense of poetry in Books XIV and XIV) and Sir Philip Sydney's Apologie for Poetry. Boccaccio's defense, which addressed the condemnation of pagan mythology and set down arguments for and against poetry, served as background for Lope's exposition of traditional ideas which he often alludes to tangentially or assumes as understood in the face of criticism leveled by moralist Spanish preceptists.²

Aside from the conceptual and literary tradition that frames Lope's defense of poetry, issues of his reputation and status most likely played a role in his motivation. Margaret Ferguson maintains in a psychosocial study of the work of DuBellay, Tasso and Sidney that "Renaissance authors of defenses create arguments and allegorical apologues" defining themselves "against what is contrary" in a struggle "to bring forth works which will have power and authority" (17)—an evocative perspective from which one could hypothesize about Lope's literary motives and social-political context. Lope was forty years old when his defense of poetry was published and it is not difficult to speculate about a continuing desire to extend his reputation beyond that of popular playwright to lyric poet-philosopher in competition with his luminary contemporaries—Góngora, Quevedo, and Cervantes.

The genre of a Defense of Poetry

Lope's Cuestión del honor debido a la poesía can be viewed as an oratorical exercise presumably delivered in some form or another to the literary circle of Juan de Arguijo in Seville. Such a framework focuses on Lope's rhetorical designs utilized to address his perceived audience. Both the Cuestión del honor debido a la poesía and its companion Para escribir Virgilio de las abejas appeared together as dedicatory epistles to Arguijo in Lope's first collection of two-hundred sonnets added to a volume that contained the texts of La hermosura de Angélica and La Dragontea published in Madrid, 1602.³ Whereas Lope's first epistle to Arguijo (Para escribir . . .) was a defense of his own poetic practice in the face of "murmuraciones" and sniping criticism, the Cuestión del honor debido a la poesía belongs to the broader genre of traditional defenses of poetry often undertaken as a badge of honor by serious poets and scholars. With a flamboyant display of erudition Lope attempts to establish his credentials as a "poeta-philosophus" fully aware of the classical, humanistic and 16th-century discussions of the place of poetry in society, its ancient, medieval, religious and esoteric heritage and the varied roles of poetry as ars, scientia, philosophia, and theologia. Lope shows particular concern for the ethical responsibilities of mimesis and poetry's influence on morality as framed by Spain's post-tridentine political, social and religious values. As such he follows the...