Luis de Góngora

Luis de Góngora y Argote (Córdoba, b. 1561–d. 1627) is one of Spain’s most celebrated poets and the main exponent of Baroque poetry in the Spanish-speaking world, comparable to John Donne in England and Giambattista Marino in Italy. Author of over four hundred poems, he exceeded in all poetic forms, including sonnets, letrillas (rondelets), décimas, romances, canciones, villancicos, and most notably the octava real and the silva, which he cultivated in his longest and most ambitious compositions, the epico-lyrical Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612), based on Ovid’s famous tale, and the Soledades (1613), a two-thousand-line poetic maze essentially about nothing, in the sense that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is a novel about nothing. Boasting bold syntactic twists and esoteric metaphors that almost obliterate their referent, the linguistic subversion of the Soledades sparked a heated debate among Gongora’s contemporaries, who argued passionately about whether to consider the text a Spanish Aeneid or utter gibberish. Besides poetry, Góngora also wrote two (some would say three) plays that departed from Lope de Vega’s popular and populist model—Las firmezas de Isabela (1610) and the unfinished El doctor Carlino (1613). Revered and vilified with equal passion throughout the 17th century, he tended to fall out of grace during the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, to be rediscovered at the turn of the century by the French Symbolists and the Spanish modernistas, who often compared his disdain for empirical reality to that of Mallarmé. His definite consecration, however, only came in 1927, when a group of scholars and poets led by Dámaso Alonso and Federico García Lorca officially crowned him the poet’s poet. Since then, his reputation as Spain’s enfant terrible and his influence among both Spanish and Latin American writers has grown exponentially, with ardent admirers like José Lezama Lima in Cuba and Pere Gimferrer in Spain.