Miguel de Barrios

This chapter highlights Miguel de Barrios, who is by far the most “baroque” of the three Marrano poets: writing in the latter half of the century, he seems to have absorbed all the influences of the culto and conceptista styles. Much of his poetry is of an ephemeral nature-panegyrics, occasional verse, burlesques, and the like, which are of some historical and social interest but which cannot be considered in general great poetry. At the same time, one can see his burlesque style, for instance, used to good effect in Alabanza jocosa a la Ley. Indeed, at his best, Barrios is able to turn all the various devices and motifs of the baroque to good advantage, whether in the expression of Jewish themes or in treating of the more conventional themes of personal tragedy or disillusionment with the world. It is in purely Jewish poems that Barrios comes into his own, in poems which combine a restrained but elegant style with an intense penitential fervor.