Introduction

INTRODUCTION Adrienne L. Martín University of California, Davis I t is overwhelmingly evident that erotic verse has been a tenacious counter-current throughout Spanish literary history, from the Peninsula’s earliest poetic manifestations to today. The jarchas, for example, and especially traditional lyric can be viscerally sensual, stretching the parameters of what conventional critical traditions have preferred to call love poetry. For example, the singular beauty and simplicity of the brief yet highly suggestive couplet “Besóme el colmenero, / y a la miel me supo el beso” (Frenk no. 141) or the provocative seguidilla “Por el val que habéis de arar, / el desposado, / por el val que habéis de arar /ya estaba arado” (Frenk no. 562) lead to and accompany the more sophisticated but no less sensual poetry of the Golden Age. In the past, however, the erotic poetic mode has been subjected to marginalization, prejudice and misreading, if not silencing and exclusion as vulgar pornography, unbecoming of its authors (if they are known) and, consequently, undeserving of scholarly attention. Erotic poetry has faced a particular number of obstacles, many of which fall under the general rubric of censorship, whether official or not. This has lead to the application of moralistic, religious and even political (and often hypocritical) criteria to dismiss erotic verse. Another factor that has contributed to its critical neglect is the subtle prejudice that still considers such poetry to be a minor genre of limited folkloric or linguistic interest, but lacking literary merit. Related to this attitude is the generalized tendency to categorize humor and burlesque literature as inferior in quality or significance to serious writing; this has had a negative impact on the reception of erotic poetry since so much of it is humorous. The lack of channels of transmission for sensual verse has also historically hampered its diffusion beyond reduced circles. Most erotic texts were not published but circulated in manuscript, even more so than normally occurred with Golden Age poetry. As part of the censorship mentioned above, manuscripts were mutilated, with pages removed and lines or complete poems crossed out. When they were published, it was often in private or collectors’ editions with limited print runs. Authorship, of course, is always a thorny issue, and its richness for current theories of genetic CALÍOPE Vol. 12, Number 2 (2006): pages 7-11 8 Adrienne L. Martín D D D D D criticism is apparent. When writing erotic poetry, poets often chose to remain anonymous or use pseudonyms and false imprints. Another urgent issue that needs to be resolved in order to facilitate the study of this poetic province is the still somewhat exploratory nature of interpretive categories, and even definitions for “erotic” literature. Fortunately, time has changed our horizons of expectation and expanded our fields of inquiry. Serious critical interest in the erotic started in the late nineteenth century with the compilations of bibliographical texts and editions of sixteenth-century poets such as those by Gallardo, Knapp, and Lustonó. It has been over the past three decades, however, especially since the French critics Pierre Alzieu, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues first published their collection Poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro in 1975, that the study of eroticism is steadily emerging as a growth industry within early modern Spanish literary studies. Partly as a natural offshoot of feminist, sexuality, and queer studies in the United States and partly as a result of the end of censorship in post-Franco Spain, a burgeoning number of scholars are shedding the critical “caution” of previous periods. Many of these studies are listed in the “Critical Studies” section of my Selected Bibliography (Martín, 2005). This critical aperture is enhancing the analysis of the exceedingly rich current of erotic literature that is gradually being made available through the publication of poetry previously available only in manuscript or otherwise censored in editions of canonical poets. In this regard the work of José J. Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. DiFranco and their collaborators has been fundamental in making accessible to scholars erotic poetic texts from manuscript collections throughout Europe. Much still remains to be done, however, both in the area of anonymous erotic verse extant...