Background to Spanish Poetry.2

Luis de Góngora is at the head of one of the strongest Spanish poetic traditions. To his detractors, his style is pejoratively described as "culterano" by analogy to "luterano"( Lutheran) much attacked during the Counter-Reformation in Spain. This style is very Latin. Often, the subject and the first verb is separated from the direct and indirect object or the demonstrative pronoun is separated from its noun by a multi-line parenthesis e.g in his Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea (Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea), this is very evident:

Un montre era de miembros eminente   An eminent mountain of limbs

este (que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,            this (which, the fearsome son of Neptune,

de un ojo ilutra el orbe de su frente,     with an eye, lights up the orb of his forehead

emulo casi del major lucero)                 emulate almost the greatest light)

ciclope.                                                  cyclop.

There is much rivalry between the traditions of Góngora and Quevado, cultismo and conceptismo ( a particularly concentrated form of conceptual wit which produced what has been called "conceits" as applied to the 17th century English Metaphysical poets like John Donne). In fact, Quevado might write with as much elevated baroque pomp as Góngora could write with dense word play and ingenious metaphors. To Walters, their difference are more differences of degree, not of kind. This was the Siglos de Oro of Spanish poetry and Spanish culture with such famous painters, writers, poets, clerics like El Greco, Veláquez, San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Lope de Vega, Cervantes. San Juan de la Cruz and his teacher and fellow mystical poet Fray Luis de Leon (  poet of the unknown light, unheard music, the evening spheres) were both imbued with biblical and kabbalistic literature and Neoplatonism and had little interest in the court manners and concerns of Castiglione's Cortegiano but wrote their major poems in the lira, an Italian poetic form borrowed from Bernardo Tasso.

Between the 17th and the early 19th centuries, there is very little poetry of genuine merit except those of Sor Juan Ines de la Cruz (1651-95) who wrote Cántico espiritual.   The 18th century is the century of French classicism, the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, with emphasis on clarity and balance as if all shadow, literal or metaphorical, had been decimated but towards the end of the 18th century, there arose what could be termed  the Pre-Romantic style typified by the art of painting of Goya, the certainty and rationality gradually giving rise to doubt, skepticism, darkness, as in the poem of Alberto Lista y Aragon:

Qué horror! La fiera noche                         What horror! The fierce night

ha triplicado el denegrido manto                has tripled the besmirched cloak

de tinieblas sin fin. Huyo del cielo               of darkness without end. The nocturnal splendor

el nocturno esplendor: no hay una estrella fled from the sky: there is not a star

que con su yerta amortiguada lumbre         whose rigid subtle light

hiera la oscuridad del firmanento.              hurts the darkness of the firmament.

However even in this period of relative infertility of Spanish poetry, the balladic tradition quietly continued eg. in the romances históricos of Duque de Rivas (1791-1865) whose narrative poem set the model for later poets.

In the Romantic period, we find poems like El estudinate de Salamanca of José de Esprondceda (1808-42), which re-worked the theme of the legendary Don Juan, emphasizing the eerie atmosphere of Gothic horror and breaking the formal and metrical rhythm of the past in much shorter lines ;

Era más de medianoche,             It was past midnight.

antiguas historias cuentan,         ancient tales are telling,

cuando en sueño y en silencio    when in dreams and in silence.

lóbrego enveulta la tierra,         gloom covers the land,

los vivos muertos parecen,        the living appear dead,

los muertos la tumba dejan.      the dead leave the grave.

Era la hora en que acaso          It was the hour when each of the  

temerosas voces suenan            fearful voices sound,

informes, en que se escuchan    unformed, when hollow

tácitas pisadas huecas,             steps are heard,

y pavorosas fantasmas             and terrifying ghosts 

entre las densas tinieblas         in the dense darkness

vagan y aúllan los perros        come and the dogs howl

amedrentados al verlas.         in horror upon seeing them.

In describing the final flicker of the death of its hero, the lines are short, almost breathless, ending in a single word line:

la frente inclina          his face bent

sobre su pecho          over his chest

y a su despcho,         and despite himself,

siente sus brazos       his arms sit

lánguidos, débiles     lanquid, weak,

desfallecer.               faint.

But even in the Romantic period, the narrative ballad tradition continued by such poets as José Zorilla (1817-93) and even in the 1850s and 1860s Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a Sevillian who settled in Madrid wrote a series of leyendas (legends) like the prose equivalent of the Romantic narrative poem. His verse, greatly influenced by the folk songs and the lyrics of the German poet Heine, was much fresher than those of his contemporaries like Ramòn de Campoamor (1817-1901) and Gaspar Núñez de Arce (1834-1903) whose poems are often formal and verbose e.g. La visión de Fray Martín of Núñez de Arce:

Era una noche destemplada y triste      It was a night intemperate and sad

Del invierno aterido. Lentamente        from frozen winter. Sluggishly

la nieve silencios, descendiendo           the silent snow, falling

Del alto cielo en abundantes copos,     from high heaven in abundant drops,

Como sudario fúnebre cubria               like a funenary shroud covered

La amortedida tierra. Cierzo helado     the dead earth. Icy breeze

Azotaba los árboles desnudos              whipped the trees stripped

De verde pompa, pero no de escarcha.  of green pump, but not of frost.

This type of poetry is entirely conventional, where nouns are followed by the usual predictable  adjectives, very different from the concise and understated poems of Bécquer. But after Bécquer died, his place was taken by Rosalía de Castro (1837-85) who wrote in her native Galician and in Castilian and by the poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902) who wrote entirely in Catalan. 

(To be cont'd)