Góngora is the highest representative of the baroque literary movement called culteranismo. Culteranismo basically consists of covering a concept with sumptuous ornamental displays, exalted metaphors, Latinisms, and mythological allusions. Góngora gradually develops this characteristic style, being only in the last years of his life his style fully “culterano”.

There is an first period in his work where the author  in which the topics of his writings are serious at times and humorous at others. To express them he used the stanzas of the moment: romances, romancillos, redondillas, sonnets, triplets, silvas, and royal octaves mainly. Góngora's poetic inspiration presents a double face. On the one hand, it shows the beautiful, idealized, splendid world. On the other, he writes ragged satires or outrageous jokes. Both lines intermingle in some of his fundamental works, such as the Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe (1618). Such duality reflects a personality with an intensely nervous character, which passes with great ease from exaltation to the deepest dejection, if not uncontrolled anger.

Among the works of the second period, from 1610, the exuberant poems of Polifemosand the Soledades stand out due to the magnitude of their intellectual difficulty and their extraordinary beauty. El Polifemo consists of five hundred and four verses in real octaves in which Góngora develops the mythological fable of the cyclops Polyphemus, in love with the nymph Galatea, who disdains him.  Soledades was conceived as four poems of the exaltation of nature, through which a pilgrim passes in four ages: youth, adolescence, maturity, and senescence. The author could only complete the first and part of the second, totaling about two thousand verses in silvas poetic style. 

Contemporaries were scandalized by the extraordinary difficulty of this poetry,  due in great part to the Latinized constructive technique. Góngora accumulates a large number of artifices in these poems and the result is great obscurantism and extreme conceptual difficulty, with constant allusions to mythology and history that comprise baggage of concepts that can only be understood by a highly cultured person of his time. The result of so much artifice is dazzling, but the enjoyment of this poetry is not easy. It does not reach the reader's soul directly, through appeals to exciting feelings through the senses, with their music,  color,  plastic effects, and formal beauty. Only after an arduous process, the poem's content reach the reader's intellect. Góngora's objective is not to communicate emotionally with the reader, but rather to propose beautiful objects for their contemplation, which must be admired for themselves.

Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea

Soledades

Fábula de Príamo y Tisbe

The poem narrates the pilgrimage and escape of a shipwrecked man after suffering a love disappointment. The author develops, with a lyric of high dificulty and beauty, a deep meditation on the nature of the human being.

Fiction in Verse

Mythology

Poetry

The Baroque is period characterized by a cultural development unwind due to the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. In many respects, Baroque supposes a  return to the Middle Ages, ceasing the clear Renaissance separation between the natural and the supernatural. The Inquisition watches over any intellectual activity that does not highlight or otherwise avoids the transcendental. Scientific research and rational philosophy practically end in Spain, with Theology taking their place. Superstition supplants religiosity in people's minds and so-called miracles ubiquitously flourish. 

In this context, the Spanish genius, unable to create intellectually in other areas, takes refuge in the aesthetic task, with an impressive list of painters, sculptors, and architects who live in this era. The literature demonstrates the same splendor. When Cervantes was still alive,  other outstanding authors such as Lope de Vega, Góngora, and Quevedo wrote their literary masterpieces. Shortly after this giants of the Spanish literature history died, began his careers the last genius of the Baroque era, Calderón de la Barca and Gracián. Somehow, the limitation in freedom of expression is offset by an increase in artifice and exaggeration in style, subjecting the language of the Renaissance to an intense elaboration that gives rise to the two great movements of the time: the 'culteranismo' and the 'conceptismo'.

Baroque

Publication of the Romancero general

Second part of Guzmán de Alfarche,  by Mateo Alemán

Second parto fo Guzmán de Alfarche,  by Mateo Alemán

Propaplladia, by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro

Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, by Francisco Delicado

Flores de poetas ilustres, compiled by Pedro de Espinosa

Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, and second part of Comedies, by Lope de Vega

The Polifemo, by Luis de Góngora

Novelas ejemplares, by Miguel de Cervantes

Rimas sacras and fourth part of Comedies, by Lope de Vega

Viaje del Parnaso, by Miguel de Cervantes

Fuenteovejuna, by Lope de Vega

The Buscón, by Quevedo

La dama duende, and Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar, by Calderón

El burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso de Molina

El burlador the Sevilla, by Tirso de Molina

La vida es sueño, by Calderón de la Barca

Soledades, by Góngora

Empresas políticas, by Saavedra Fajardo

Closing of the theaters until 1649

El Parnaso español, by Quevedo

Las Meninas by Velazquez

Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake

King Lear and Macbeth, by William Shakesperare

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Soledades (1613)

By Luis de Góngora y Argote

Time Period: Baroque

Genre: Fiction in Verse, Mythology, Poetry

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