Luis de Góngora y Argote

Spanish poet

• Born: July 11, 1561
• Died: May 24, 1627

Regarded as the poet’s poet of the Spanish Golden Age of literature, Góngora introduced the highly stylized, baroque manner into Spanish poetry.

Early Life

Luis de Góngora y Argote (lew-EES day GAWNG-eh-rah ee ahr-GOH-tay) was born to a patrician family in Córdoba, one of the principal towns of Andalusia, the coastal Mediterrean region of Spain. Built by the Romans, Córdoba had been conquered in the Middle Ages by the Islamic Moors. Though Spanish Christians under Ferdinand III had reconquered Córdoba in 1236, the city retained the flavor of its Moorish past, including a vibrant oral tradition of poetry and song that synthesized Arab, Berber, and Spanish elements. While still a boy, Góngora composed his first poems and songs in imitation of oral tradition. At the same time, he became became steeped in classical Greek, Latin, and Italian literatures—thanks in large part to his father’s ample library.

He continued his studies at the Universidad de Salamanca, following a course in law. Upon graduation, he returned to Córdoba, where he assumed his uncle’s prebendary at the city’s cathedral. This allowed him a portion of the church’s revenues in return for minimal clerical duties. To the consternation of his bishop, Góngora indugled more in temporal than religious pursuits. A “man about town,” he attended bullfights, took an active part in the city’s nightlife and spent much of his free time composing songs and poems to the women that caught his fancy. He also became addicted to gambling, which led him to financial ruin late in life.

Life’s Work

Góngora’s early lyrical poetry, songs, and romances first won him popular recognition in Córdoba and beyond. Though these works were not officially published until after his death in 1627, they were disseminated by manuscript and word of mouth during his lifetime. Many became—and remain—classics. The style is light and the wordplay fanciful, as Góngora tackles time-honored themes such as the fickleness of Fortune or the mutability of romantic love.

Typical of this manner is a ballad on Fortune with the refrain “cuando pitos, flautas/cuando flautas, pitos” (which translates freely as when you want a whistle, [Fortune gives you] a flute, when a flute, a whistle). Similarly, his well-known sonnet opening “la dulce boca que a gustar convida” (the sweet mouth which offers a taste) ends with an image of thwarted love turned to venom. This latter poem is said to have been inspired by one of Góngora’s own ill-starred love affairs. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Góngora’s early work is its grounding in observation and experience. His sonnet on his native Córdoba has a painterly quality that celebrates the region’s “Oh fertil llano, oh sierras levantadas,/que privilegia el cielo y dora el dia!” (oh fertile planes, oh rising mountains, that the sky smiles down on and colors gold). His poem “La mas bella nina” vividly records the bitter experience of a peasant girl, newly married and widowed as her groom is called off to war.

In the early 1600’s, Góngora moved from Córdoba to Madrid (to be near the Spanish royal court). He gradually departed from his early style, evolving a much more mannered approach indebted to his classical learning more so than to his oral tradition. In the parlance of the day, Góngora gave up the estilo llano (or plain style) for the estilo culto (or high-culture style). In place of ballads, sonnets, and the short romances, he attempted longer, more consciously “literary” works with complex narrative structures, convoluted latinate syntax, and tangles of metaphors and classical allusions. In short, he began to compose works to be read (and reread), rather than to be read aloud or sung.

His new style found an appreciative audience in the highly literate court of Phillip III, but it also engendered the furious opposition of Góngora’s chief poetic rivals: Lope de Vega Carpio and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas , who proudly hailed themselves common “geese” in opposition to Góngora’s self-styled group of high culture “swans.” This bitter literary feud continued to the end of Góngora’s life, taking a particularly vicious turn in 1625, when Quevedo y Villegas bought at auction the Madrid home of Góngora, who was nearly bankrupt because of his gambling losses.

The culminating works that mark Góngora’s new style were Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1627; Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea, 1961) and Soledades (1627; The Solitudes of Don Luis de Góngora , 1931; The Solitudes, 1964). Both works retain a semblance of narrative: The former is a reworking of Ovid’s tale of the cyclops Polyphemus’s thwarted love for the nymph Galatea; the latter is a dreamy idyll in which the shipwrecked protagonist encounters the simple life of island folk and marries a beautiful maiden.

A web of intertextuality, built upon description, metaphor, and allusions, however, almost overwhelm the narrative—and defy easy translation. For example, Góngora transforms the crude and violent one-eyed goatherd of Ovid and Homer into an aesthete who in his love song to Galatea drops learned references from the Queen of Sheba to the King of Java. At times, Polyphemus’s metaphors metastasize. He develops elaborate conceits in which the antlers of an aged deer become “de Helvecias picas” (Helvetian pikes) and his own single eye becomes a sunlike orb. Similarly, the first stanza of Soledades begins simply enough with “Era del ano la estacion florida” (literally, it was of the year the flowery season) but soon morphs into a complex net of sexual allusions to Europa, Ganymede, and Jupiter. While the poem demands much of its reader, it generally repays the effort. Soledades is not so much a narrative poem but an ambitious interior journey that calls into question the traditional dichotomies of poet and reader, subject and object, and word and thing. Though he planned a series of four installments, Góngora abandoned the Soledades project after completing the first part. Yet its “unfinished” status is somehow appropriate to such an “open-ended” work that is still being “written” in the act of contemporary creative interpretation.

Significance

Góngora’s highly mannered late work—a poetry for poetry’s sake seemingly divorced both from common speech patterns and objective reality—gave rise to a European literary style, gongorismo. Gongorismo has often been likened to the Euphuistic tradition of a particular sixteenth century English literature (whose foremost practitioner was the prosodist John Lyly): Both are baroque in nature, highly ornamental, and self-consciously artful. However, gongorismo surpasses mere Euphuism in its intellectual concentration (similar to that of the Metaphysical School of seventeenth century English poetry) and its radical aestheticism that promotes the idea of a poem as a self-referential object rather than an Aristotelian “imitation” of some external reality.

Góngora can be seen as an important precursor to the nineteenth century French Symbolist poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and, most particularly, Stéphane Mallarmé. He also became a rallying figure to twentieth century Spanish poets such as Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti, who saw in the estilo culto a prefigurement of high literary modernism. In the 1920’s Góngora’s work again became the locus of a fierce literary argument: Proponents held up Soledades as a world masterpiece while detractors decried the work as unintelligible, self-absorbed, snd ostentatious in its use of classical allusions (charges similar to those laid by antimodernists against works such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Nor has the fascination with Góngora’s late work lessened for postmodernist critics, who have explored its deconstruction of authorial “voice,” subversion of gender roles, and reliance on liminal settings.

Bibliography

Brenan, Gerald. “Gongora and the New Poetry.” The Literature of the Spanish People: From Roman Times to the Present Day. London: Cambridge University Press, 1951. This magisterial work remains a key English-language overview of Spanish literature. The chapter on Góngora does an excellent job of providing the historical and social context of the poet’s “light” and “dark” periods and recognizes his primacy as the poet’s poet of Spain’s literary Golden Age.

Collins, Marsha. Soledades, Gongora’s Masque of the Imagination. Columbia, Mo: University of Missouri Press, 2002. In an ambitious defense of Góngora’s famously difficult “masterwork,” Collins reinterprets the poem in the tradition of the literary court masque—effectively opening up the poem written for the “closed” literary clique of the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy.

Foster, David William, and Virginia Ramos Foster. Luis Gongora. New York: Twayne, 1973. A thorough reconsideration of Góngora’s entire literary output, including the early work. Also a good place to start for biographical material on the poet.

Lehrer, Eve. Classical Myth and “Polifemo” of Gongora. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1989. This work examines the use of classical mythology in Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea as a contemporary literary code accessible to the educated reader of Góngora’s day.

Picasso, Pablo. Gongora. New York: George Braziller, 1985. This work, originally published in Paris in 1948, features Picasso’s calligraphic renderings and illustrations of selected sonnets by Góngora (translated into English by Alan S. Trueblood). Picasso’s graphic intensity mirrors Góngora’s lyric intensity in a manner similar to William Blake’s illustrated lyrics.

Woods, Michael J. Gracian Meets Gongora: The Theory and Practice of Wit. Oxford, England: Aris & Philips, 1995. Woods analyzes the play of Góngora’s language through the theories of wit and tropes of his contemporary admirer Baltasar Gracián y Morales.