SOURCE: Wilson, Edward Meryon. “Introduction.” In The Solitudes of Don Luis de Góngora: A Text with Verse Translation, pp. xi-xxi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

[In the following excerpt from the prefatory matter to his translation of the Soledades, Wilson examines the importance of Góngora's poetry, concentrating on his use of metaphors in the Soledades, but also describing the poet's early works and evolving influence.]

GONGORISM

Gongorism is the name applied to a school of writing, of which [The Solitudes] is the most important example. It is remarkable for a latinisation of vocabulary and syntax, combined with a great elaboration and complication of metaphor. The wish to rescue poetry from old clichés and to give the Spanish language a classical sonority doubtless led Góngora to increase those elements in his style from about the year 1590 onwards. This trend was assisted by his gradually turning away from popular ballads and love-poetry to the eulogy of nobles and the praises of the ladies of the court. So his serious poetry became more heroic and extravagant at the same time, even when he was not writing about heroic subjects. The Polyphemus was his first long poem in this style, but The Solitudes, unfettered by a preconceived story or by a definite stanza form, allowed a greater scope to his powers.

Góngora's neologisms were not so daring as has often been supposed. He did not invent many new words, and most of his innovations had already been used by earlier poets. What he did was to heap them together in an unprecedented manner and to use certain words to excess. The reader will be struck by the frequence of such words as sonorous, prolix, lascivious and canorous in my translation. He also used well-established Spanish words with their original Latin meaning.

The syntactic liberties were more violent, although examples of most of them—hyperbata, absolutes and Greek accusatives—can also be found in the works of his predecessors. Inversions are to be found in most poetry, but Góngora crowded his pages with them and further distorted the normal order of the sentence by separating the noun from the adjective and the verb from the auxiliary. English, with its relative lack of inflections, does not lend itself easily to such effects; but I have tried to reproduce them where I was able to do so:

Destined, for Hymeneal banquets, prey.

Frequent allusion to Greco-roman mythology is also considered characteristic of gongorism. Such allusions are perhaps more frequent in Góngora than in other renaissance poets, but they are not so recondite as some critics would suppose; I doubt if there are many that do not come from the Metamorphoses of Ovid. These allusions are not merely illustrative; they remind us of the classical standards of beauty, strength, speed, etc., which are equalled, if not excelled, in this hyperbolic world. …

In his use of metaphor Góngora often resembles the conceited school of Quevedo and Gracián, and some of our Metaphysical poets. ‘Even his very metaphors metaphorise themselves’ complained one of his contemporaries. One of his most frequent practices is to continue the metaphor and at times to reinforce it with a subtle play upon words (cf. Sol. I lines 561-4). Or, as in the description of the river in the First Solitude, he rapidly changes them in one magnificent period. Also he may qualify the metaphor, to show within what limits it applies. The bridegroom of the epithalamium is a Cupid—he is young and handsome, in love with the village Psyche, the Cupid of Apuleius—but (we are told) he has not the other attributes of the blind archer, the ‘little love-god’.

From this summary it will be seen that gongorism and euphuism are not similar manifestations. Spain had passed through its euphuistic stage before Góngora was born; gongorism could appear only at the end of a poetical epoch. Some of the stylistic features of euphuism may appear in Góngora: the parallelism and antithesis; but none of those of gongorism is to be found in Euphues—neither the latinisms of syntax and vocabulary, nor the metaphorical complications. In their different ways Milton and Crashaw are the English parallels to Góngora; Lyly belonged to an earlier age.

‘THE SOLITUDES’

At first sight The Solitudes appears to be a formless poem. The complete poem was to have been in four books, and of these we possess only one part and a fragment of another. Probably they were to have been entitled the Solitudes of the Country, of the Shores, of the Woods and of the Deserts. We have only the Solitude of the Country and a long fragment of the Solitude of the Shores. Our efforts at guessing the form of the whole are therefore somewhat haphazard, but I think that some kind of parallelism was intended between the different parts. The youth remains the same throughout; in each part, after a preliminary journey, he makes a soliloquy (in the first part of rustic life; in the second, of his unhappy love) then reaches a ‘well-found hermitage’, and after an interval, an old man tells him a long story (the history of nautical exploration, in the first; the story of his daughters' fishing in the second) and after a further interval an alternate song occurs (a choral epithalamium; an amœbæan eclogue) and finally the games terminating the First Solitude are paralleled by the hawking in the second. It seems probable that Góngora nearly completed the Second Solitude.

The story of The Solitudes is not important in itself and has little narrative interest. It is merely a convenient peg on which Góngora could hang his superb descriptions, elaborated by all the arts of metaphor and hyperbole, and interspersed with beautiful lyrics. The action takes place in a world that is curiously artificial and rich: not merely the world of Sannazzaro and of Montemayor developed to an extreme, but something more robust, less effeminate. Things are mentioned that we feel Montemayor would not have dared to mention: the hairiness of the wrestlers, the aphrodisiacal nature of the oyster. Moreover there is a strange mixture of the modern and the classical; Cupid leads the fisher-boys to their future father-in-law, Neptune sups with the syrens while the old man sups with his guest, but the old mountaineer knows all about the transatlantic expeditions of Columbus and Balboa. Then again we have not the feeling of a roman à clef; the shepherds are idealised, but they are not elegant dressed-up courtiers. In fact it is more than the mere pastoral world, though this is a constituent of it.

T. S. Eliot wrote of Ben Jonson: ‘We cannot call a man's work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with a world which he has himself created; the superficies is his world. It is a world like Lobatchevsky's; the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like systems of non-euclidean geometry. They are not fancy because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.’ This also seems to me to be true of the very different world that Góngora created in The Solitudes. The world he creates is a simplified one and a more intense one than the real world. Ugliness is to be found only in the Cave of Polyphemus, and in the Solitude of the deserts—which was never written. The trees bear no dead branches, the streams are never muddy, the women are all young, and men, if they grow old, become wise and venerable. But this is not all. As Dámaso Alonso says: ‘The very beauty of this world is stylised and simplified in order to be reduced to well-drawn outlines, to agile foreshortenings, to harmonious sonorities and to splendid colours. By means of a continual and complicated metaphorical play the object tends to lose its individuality and to be entered in a metaphorical category. We do not look for sea-water, fresh water, water from a fountain or lagoon in The Solitudes; crystals is the label that covers all. But crystals also is used to describe the beautiful limbs of a woman.’ Herr Pabst, in his interesting study of Góngora's Creation, remarks that ‘in Góngora all that glitters becomes gold’. Góngora's is a world that can be described in a number of metaphors, and its physics is Greek mythology. Colours for instance, as Dámaso Alonso notes, are reduced to four or five simple ones, and these may be replaced by a number of metaphors; thus ‘lilies, foam, snow, swans and lambs’ are all used metaphorically for white objects in the course of the poem. In this way, with this strong link between the object and the metaphor, Góngora's universe gains in cohesion and variety.

In the Dedication to the Duke of Béjar, Góngora identifies the footsteps of the hero with the lines of the poem; so the reader, treading as it were the lines of verse, becomes himself the hero. His previous love-affair leads him to one outburst of grief and two gentler reminders of his former passion; otherwise, his emotional equipment is almost confined to a specialised visual appreciation of natural beauty. There is no attempt to analyse this impression, nor to provide for it a vaguely cosmic background, a feeling that

One impulse from a vernal wood
          May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
          Than all the sages can.

In fact by the elaborate apparatus of pathetic fallacies the human being has more effect on the environment than it has on him. Nature is to be looked at as though it were an architectural exterior, but a baroque church rather than a gothic cathedral. This is indeed very different from the Wordsworthian view to which we are all accustomed. And our sensitiveness in this peculiar world gives us a new point of view for our feelings in the world we know, something with which to correlate them.

In the formation of this world Góngora was carrying to an extreme the efforts of his predecessors. We have fainter visions of it in the bucolic poets, in Tasso and in Montemayor, but Góngora both increased its scope and added to its brilliance. By latinism and increase and complication of metaphor he galvanised outworn poetic devices. He also introduced a more important change; he added to the brilliance of the background and made it at least as interesting as the actors.

All is made as magnificent as possible. The beauty and grandeur described must be unique, and so they are emphasised by exaggeration and hyperbole. The bride's eyes could warm the cold Norwegian shores, her hands could whiten parched Ethiopia; the palace was built of marble, so pure that it was transparent. In all this ‘wit appears as a delicate flavour to magnificence’. This we have already found in Góngora's use of metaphor and play upon words; what started as a means of emphasis becomes an artificial conceit (I use neither adjective nor noun in a derogatory sense) to be enjoyed in itself. But we also find a wit of idea, as opposed to this largely verbal wit (in so far as the two can be separated) which often takes the same form: a pseudo-logical and ingenious cause is given for an action or state: the youth gives as a votive offering, the plank on which he escaped shipwreck, because rocks are flattered by the signs of gratitude; the deer will not easily be led to the marriage feast, because it bears the sign of cuckoldry. These and the like conceits are not puerile; they lighten by surprise what might have been too heavy, splendid and monotonous. Often we are amused by what the seventeenth-century reader took seriously: the he-goat

          who for near a lustrum was the spouse
Of twice a hundred she-goats …

the aged fisherman combing his hair with undeceit, and the swan that dies conveniently so that the pilgrim can enjoy its song. But these fancies are so self-conscious that they are not purely ridiculous, and the reader can almost class them with those that have been mentioned before. When all is said and done, Góngora's lapses from taste are few, and in The Solitudes we find little that is frigid.

There is still a little to say about Góngora's metaphors. Although they are heightened by the various complicating devices that we have already examined, many of them are commonplace. As Dámaso Alonso points out, this is not a fault in the work; a writer cannot produce brilliant and original metaphors all the time, and contrast is essential. In Góngora metaphor is often used where an ordinary poet would use plain statement, and an ‘original’ metaphor in his work has the same importance that a commonplace one would have in the work of a sixteenth-century poet. Góngora's work starts from the plane which other poets only occasionally reach. But when he wants to, what striking metaphors he can give us! The islands in the river are leafy parentheses in the period of its current, the Straits of Magellan an elusive silver hinge joining two oceans, the troops of birds waxing and waning moons, the village chimneys watch-towers of the sunset, and the marriage-bed

A field of feathers for the strife of love.

GóNGORA'S OTHER POEMS

Góngora's early ballads are adequately described in every manual of Spanish literature. They figure largely in every anthology of Spanish verse. So do his jesting ‘letrillas’ and his italianate love-poetry. His eulogistic court-poetry culminates in the Panegyric to the Duke of Lerma (1617). Although unfinished it is a long and elaborate poem, almost as elaborate as The Solitudes, and it consists of a pageant of the life of the favourite, and of the reign, of King Philip III. It is undoubtedly extravagant in its eulogy, but it contains much splendid verse and beautiful imagery. The Polyphemus, to which I have already referred, is an elaboration of the Fable of Acis and Galatea from the thirteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Almost as daring, it is a tidier poem than The Solitudes, and its extravagance is bounded by the set fable and the eight-line stanza. The story is essentially that of Ovid, but there is a long section introduced describing Sicily, and everywhere Góngora has remodelled his original. The Ballad of Pyramus and Thisbe, Góngora's favourite poem, in which he deliberately burlesqued his serious verse, is interestingly disconcerting. Then there are tart and bitter poems satirising his contemporaries and their vices, and a few fine moral sonnets that treat of his poverty, old age and disillusion. Such a summary as this can give only a faint idea of the breadth of Góngora's talent.

INFLUENCE OF GóNGORA

On their first appearance The Solitudes were the subject of much discussion, criticism and abuse. ‘Antidotes’ to the new style were written, and dramatists were given a new subject at which to poke stage fun. The satirist Quevedo, who had previously written against Góngora's obscenity (Quevedo's poems are quite as obscene as Góngora's), wrote bitter lampoons at its expense. Perhaps for this reason Góngora left the poem uncompleted. In argument Góngora relied upon his powers as a satirist, as well as on more temperate discussion.

After the first reaction his influence was immense. His innovations were imitated ad nauseam, and his lines were often quoted in the poems of his disciples. Whole poems were composed, consisting entirely of lines from his works, torn from their context and ingeniously put together, to form a panegyric to him, or even the paraphrase of a chapter of the Apocalypse. His works, published posthumously, ran through many editions, and his most important poems were usefully commented by Salcedo Coronel; less important commentaries were written by Pellicer, Díaz de Ribas and Salazar Mardones, all within twenty years of his death.

Góngora's imitators produced little of merit, but they have undoubtedly been too sweepingly condemned. Bocángel, the Count of Villamediana, and above all, Soto de Rojas did some of their finest work under the direct influence of Góngora. The vogue continued well into the eighteenth century; as late as 1711 León y Mansilla published a Third Solitude, devoid of all merit. The general level of this poetry was low: a rococo frigidity, occasionally rising to the pretty or the witty.

With the growth of neo-classicism his influence declined, and at the end of the eighteenth century Góngora was hardly even read. Intelligent critics gave him credit for his early poems, and by these, and by his scapegoat reputation, he was remembered throughout the nineteenth century.

The return to Góngora was initiated by the French symbolist poets. A poet so obscure, they felt, must be very beautiful. Verlaine decided to learn Spanish in order to translate him into French, but he seems never to have learned enough Spanish even to read him. He put the last line of the First Solitude as the epigraph to one of his sonnets, but he probably knew little more of Góngora than that lovely image. Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet, was infected by the French enthusiasm, and brought it to Spain. He celebrated Góngora and Velazquez in three sonnets early in the present century. His knowledge of Góngora was far from profound, but he contrived to draw attention to what, hitherto, had been condemned without being read.

Serious study of Góngora virtually began with this century. L. P. Thomas, Alfonso Reyes, R. Foulché-Delbosc and Miguel Artigas laid the foundations; the main edifice is Dámaso Alonso's, and others (Emilio Orozco, Robert Jammes, Antonio Vilanova, R. O. Jones and E. J. Gates) have made useful additions to it. The tercentenary of 1927 was enthusiastically celebrated by the young poets of the 1920's: Jorge Guillén wrote his beautiful décima and Rafael Alberti his Fragment of the third Solitude. Since 1930 the early enthusiasm has subsided, but Góngora's place among the masters of Spanish poetry is uncontested.