them) and that second steep reality of the soul in
whose service they have proved themselves such
extravagant heroes.
Little affected by the Renaissance and not at
all by the Reformation, early Spanish literature
reached a stop, just prior to the discovery of
America, in the work of Juan de Mena (1411–
1456). For two hundred years thereafter, during
the 15th and 16th centuries or until the time
of Go ́ngora, the ‘‘old taste,’’ characteristic in
its resources, limited in its means, succumbed,
and the influence of Italy held an ascendancy.
As Quintana says in the introduction to hisPoe-
sı ́as Selectas Castellanas(1817), ‘‘The old asso-
nanced versification of octosyllabics, more
suited to the madrigal and the epigram than to
more ambitious poems, could not be sustained
without awkwardness and crudeness—as Juan
de Mena had found. It was unfit for high
and animated conceptions. Force of thought,
warmth of feeling, harmony and variety, without
which none can be considered a poet, all were
lacking.’’ But Cristo ́bal de Castillejo in a violent
satire ‘‘compared these novelties of the Petrar-
quistas, as he called them, to those Luther had
introduced into the Christian faith.’’
Great names abounded in Spanish poetry
following this breakdown of the old modes,
some of the greatest in Spanish literary history,
all under the newer influence, all working as they
believed to enlarge and enrich the prosody and
general resources of the language. Fernando de
Herrera celebrated the majesty of Imperial
Spain. There was the mystic Fray Luis de Leo ́n
and among the rest Saint Teresa, that greatest of
Spanish mystics, whose few poems, not more
than thirty in all, ignoring grammar, logic, ignor-
ing everything but the stark cry of the spirit,
wrung direct from the heart, make them seem
its own agonized voice crying in our ears. It is
the same recurrent, unreasoning note found in
the strident, bright colors and tortured lines of
El Greco. Escape! As ideas come into Spain
they will stop and turn upward: ‘‘I proceed,’’
Unamuno says still in the Twentieth Century,
‘‘by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without
documentation, without proof, outside of mod-
ern European logic, disdainful of its methods.’’
But toward the end of the Sixteenth Century
the typically Spanish reaction occurred. It is curi-
ous and interesting to note how the otherwise
mildly acquiescent Quintana responds to it, how
for the first time he really warms to his subject
and his style glows when he records: ‘‘At this time
(1570–80) corresponding with the youth of Go ́n-
gora and Lope de Vega it happened that a new
interest began to appear in the old romances....
‘‘Stripped of the artifice and violence which
the imitation of other modes had necessitated; its
authors caring little for what the odes of Horace
or thecancionesof Petrarch were like; and being
composed more by instinct than by art, theroman-
cescould not possess the complexity and the ele-
vation of the odes of Leo ́n, Herrera and Rioja.
But they were our own lyric poetry; in them music
found its own accents; these were the songs one
heard at night from windows and in the streets to
thesoundoftheharportheguitar....
‘‘There are in them more beautiful expres-
sions and more energetic, ingenious and delicate
sallies than in all our poetry besides. But curi-
ously enough in a few years this revival of a taste
which popularized poetry, and rescued it from
the limits of imitation to which the earlier poets
had reduced it, served also to make it incorrect
and to break it down, inviting to this abandon
the same facility as in its rehabilitation.’’ Go ́n-
gora was the man!
It was Luis de Go ́ngora who as a lyric poet
brought the new adventure to its fullest fruition
and then attempted to go away, up and beyond
it—to amazing effect.
Go ́ngora is the only Spanish poet whose
inventions, at the beginning of the 17th Century,
retain a lively interest for us today, one of the few
poets of Spain of world reputation and lasting
quality of greatness. Look at his picture: chin
deep in his cravat, his forehead a Gibraltar, the
look on his face slightly amused but formidable,
not to say invincible, his person retracted into an
island of strength resembling nothing so much as
the map of Spain itself. There you have the spirit
that sustained Lorca in our day.
A master in hisromances, one of the greatest
masters of the burlesque and the satire, Go ́ngora
had already established a redoubtable reputation
when toward the latter part of his life he set out to
elevate the tone of Spanish poetry, illustrating it
with erudition and new conceptions, enriching
the language with those tones and turns which
distinguish it from prose. It was the same ambi-
tion which had inspired Juan de Mena and Fer-
nando de Herrera; but Go ́ngora lacked, as they
said, the culture and moderation possessed by
those predecessors.
Be that as it may Go ́ngora, who to the end of
his days continued at times to write his lovelyLament for Ignacio Sa ́nchez Mejı ́as