GÓNGORA Y ARGOTE, LUIS DE (1561–1627)

GÓNGORA Y ARGOTE, LUIS DE (1561–1627), Spanish poet of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Luis de Góngora y Argote was born into a privileged family in Córdoba on 11 July 1561. Góngora was destined for a career in the church from childhood. He took minor orders in 1575, studied canon law at the University of Salamanca 1576–1581, and became a deacon of the Cathedral of Córdoba in 1585. As a representative of the cathedral, Góngora traveled widely in Spain, and made frequent trips to the court of Philip III. He finally moved to the court at Madrid in 1617, was ordained in 1618, and subsequently became chaplain to the king. During his years at the court of Philip III and Philip IV, Góngora enjoyed powerful patrons, became a member of the cultural elite, gained access to the innermost circles of the crown, and acquired the reputation of a gifted poet and esteemed man of letters. Ill health and financial exigency forced him to leave the capital in 1626 to return to Córdoba, where he died on 23 May 1627.

Góngora was a lifelong experimenter with poetry who composed in a variety of poetic forms—ballads, songs, rondelets, and sonnets, among others. He also was the author of the play Las firmezas de Isabela (1610) as well as the unfinished drama El doctor Carlino (1613). Góngora is primarily known, and remembered, however, as the creator of gongorismo, a style of discourse identified with his poetic masterpieces the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) and the Soledades (1612–1614). Both are hybrid works, difficult to classify by type. The Polifemo is based on the story in Book Thirteen of Ovid's Metamorphoses that tells of the ill-fated love of the cyclops Polyphemus for the nymph Galatea, enamored of the handsome Acis. The Soledades mix epic and pastoral motifs in two poems totaling about two thousand lines in length that detail the wanderings of a mysterious, shipwrecked pilgrim through the dreamlike countryside of an unknown land. Góngora authorized the publication of only a few of his poems during his lifetime, although collections of his works started to appear shortly after his death.

When the Polifemo and Soledades first circulated at court, they unleashed a firestorm of controversy over the innovative poetic language employed by Góngora. Gongorismo, also called cultismo or culteranismo, that is, the cultured or cultivated style, refers to elegant discourse replete with rhetorical ornamentation: hyperbata (inversions of natural word order), neologisms, latinate words and syntax, elaborate conceits, mythological allusions, and so forth. Gongorism is a self-consciously challenging and at times enigmatic style directed at an erudite, aristocratic audience, able and willing to decipher the linguistic puzzles posed in verse. Góngora's vociferous detractors, who included such important writers as Lope de Vega and Francisco Quevedo, objected to what they saw as the affectation and deliberate obscurantism of Gongorine style. The great Góngora debate, which played out in well-known exchanges in caustic letters, satirical verse, and at the literary academies, was essentially a battle over which kind of poetic style would become the predominant one—a simpler, clearer type of discourse, more accessible to a wide range of readers, or the more ornate language of Gongorism, which appealed to a smaller, more intellectually engaged audience. Cultismo, often associated with mannerism and the baroque, and frequently compared to marinism in Italy and euphuism, the elegant and artful style identified with the Elizabethan English writer John Lyly, ultimately won the day and many disciples. The powerful influence of Gongorism was eclipsed in the eighteenth century, only to be resurrected by Spain's Generation of 1927 poets, a group so-named in honor of the tricentennial anniversary of the death of Góngora, whose complex metaphors they particularly admired.

Over the years, Góngora has been called both the "Prince of Darkness" and the "Angel of Light." Not surprisingly, to this day, the poet's works and Gongorism remain a subject of considerable debate. While some critics see in Gongorism the construction of an independent world of words that has nothing to do with the realm of everyday experience, and in some ways anticipates postmodern literature, others envision in the poet's cultismo a cryptic language employed to create allegories critical of imperial Spain. Still another group of scholars views Gongorism as an attempt to restore to poetic language the visionary power of the vates, the poet-prophet of classical antiquity, and to make poetry a vehicle for exploring the mysteries of the universe. Although these critical viewpoints differ greatly, they all show a heightened interest in Góngora and Gongorism as a poet and poetic style closely tied to the court culture of Habsburg Spain and of Europe in general at the time.

See also Philip III (Spain); Philip IV (Spain); Spanish Literature and Language; Vega, Lope de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Góngora, Luis de. Polyphemus and Galatea. Introduction by Alexander A. Parker. Translated by Gilbert F. Cunningham. Austin, 1977. Translation of Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612).

——. The Solitudes. Translated by Gilbert F. Cunningham. Baltimore, 1968. Translation of Soledades (1612–1614).

Rivers, Elias L., intro. and ed. "Luis de Góngora." In Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain, pp. 157–198. New York, 1966. Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988. Selection of poems with prose translations.

Secondary Sources

Beverley, John. Aspects of Góngora's "Soledades." Amsterdam, 1980.

Collins, Marsha S. The "Soledades," Góngora's Masque of the Imagination. Columbia, Mo., 2002.

Gaylord [Randel], Mary. "Metaphor and Fable in Góngora's Soledad primera." Revista Hispánica Moderna 40 (1978–1979): 97–112.

McCaw, R. John. The Transforming Text: A Study of Luis de Góngora's "Soledades." Potomac, Md. 2000.

Smith, Paul Julian. "Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense." PMLA 101 (1986): 82–94.

Terry, Arthur. "Luis de Góngora: The Poetry of Transformation." In Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice, pp. 65–93. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.

MARSHA S. COLLINS