Ovidian Lyric Voice in the Iberian Baroque

The present study is an analysis of the ways in which Ovid’s account of the myth of Echo and Narcissus (Metamorphoses vv. 357–401) serves as a foundation for models of sonority and voice within Iberian Baroque aesthetics. In more specific terms, I argue that these models enabled seventeenth-century Iberian (and Ibero-American) poets—especially Luis de Góngora and those poets in dialogue with his work—to make strategic use of gendered discourse at both the semantico-referential and pragmatic levels of signification. Grounding my analysis in a close reading of selected works by Luis de Góngora, Sóror Violante do Céu, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, I point to the implementation of specific poetic elements (such as hyperbaton, enjambment, and rima abrazada) which constitute a mode of poetic composition that works in large measure to foreground prosody over semantic and syntactic order. The result is a “poetics of Echo” that draws from a specific conception of Echo’s linguistic presence in the Ovidian version of the myth. I argue that a particularly Ovidian intersection of body, textuality, and voice emerges during the early seventeenth-century Ibero-Baroque poetry that I consider.