LUIS DE GÓNGORA Y ARGOTE (1574-1647)

One of the most influential Spanish poets of his era.

His Baroque, convoluted style, known as Gongorism (gongorismo) was so exagerated by less gifted imitators that his reputation suffered after his death until it underwent a revaluation in the 20th century.

The son of a judge Góngora profited from his father´s fine library and from relatives in positions to further his education.

He attended the University of Salamanca and achieved fame quickly.

He took religious orders so that he might receive an ecclesiastical benefice but was not ordained priest until he was 55 years old when he was named chaplain to the royal court in Madrid.

His letters as well as some of his satirical verse show an unhappy and financially distressed life vexed by the animosity that some of his writings had evoked.

He had strong partisans -Lope de Vega was an admirer- and equally powerful enemies none more so than his rival Francisco de Quevedo who outdid even Góngora in mordant and unrelenting satire.

Góngora was always successful with his lighter poetry -the romances, letrillas ans sonners- but his longer works the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades (both circulated in manuscript in 1613) written in an intensely difficult and purposely complex style provoked the scorn and enmity of many.

There has been a temptation to divide his work into light-dark, easy difficult paradigms but 20th-century criticism has shown his compositions to have a unity that is perhaps clouded by the compactness and intensity of style in the longer ones.

Gongorismo derives from a more general base, culteranismo a Latinizing movement that had been an element in Spanish poetry since the 15th century.

In the Polifemo and the Soledades, Góngora applied his full energies to enhancing and augmenting each device and decoration until the basically uncomplicated story was obscured. The same devices are found in his more popular lyrics; they simply had never been so insistently thrust upon the reader.

The 19th century found little to like in the obscure and difficult Góngora and his poetry had to wait until his tercentenary in 1927 to be accorded a general review and re-establishment. The cold beauty of his lines at last found an nappreciative and receptive audience willing to see the value of verse that shunned intimate emotion but that created the purest poetry for its own sake.