Popular poetry
Popular poetry, however, suffered no crisis or decline. Though often marginalized from high cultural debate, popular poetry was constantly criticized and denigrated, despite flourishing throughout the century in its chapbook format. “Literatura de cordel,” literally “literature on a string,” was so called because it was exhibited at street vendors’ stands hanging from a cord. The texts were brief, usually in verse, sometimes containing plays or prose writings, but always cheap. The most common form was the ballad, frequently sold by the blind, who would sing the verses to the accompaniment of a guitar or other musical instrument.
Ballads could be of various kinds.2 Those belonging to the oral tradition continued to be reprinted in response to public demand. Such compositions featured personalities from the Carolingian cycle, chivalrous themes, or tales of captives. Their protagonists were Charlemagne, the Twelve Peers of France, Count Alarcos, the Cid, and other heroes from the medieval and Renaissance worlds. Though these works have little aesthetic value, they bear witness to a popular worldview that would outlive the eighteenth century.
A second strand comprises historical ballads that narrate deeds, real and invented, of personalities who may or may not have existed. The already existing stock of themes was augmented by recent characters and events, Felipe V and the War of the Spanish Succession, and notorious bandits considered heroes by much of the population. Religious topics frequently appear, sometimes lives of saints or biblical characters, who also figure in
1 Jose´ Checa Beltra´n, Razones del buen gusto (Madrid: CSIC, 1999).
2 Mar´ıa Jose´ Rodr´ıguez Sa´nchez de Leo´n, “Literatura popular.” In Historia literaria de
Espan˜a en el siglo XVIII. Ed. Francisco Aguilar Pin˜al (Madrid: Trotta/CSIC, 1996),
Pp. 32 7 –36 7 .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Eighteenth-century poetry
325
Carols, pastoral songs, and prayers. Ballads incorporate satirical, festive, and amorous elements, as well as horror, violence, and bloodshed.
Although such ballads were frequently banned at the end of the century, they continued to be sold and distributed. Enlightened government agencies, aware that children learned to read via such texts and suspicious of their moral content, attempted to use ballads to disseminate salutary moral lessons by recounting the deeds of worthy heroes and memorable events from Spanish history. However, the plan failed and street literature continued to flourish until finally dying a natural death in the early twentieth century.
Learned poetry in the Baroque style
Roughly speaking, the eighteenth century can be divided stylistically into two halves. The first half was dominated by Baroque style, the second half by Neoclassicism. Literary historians like Luis Jose Velazquez (1722-1772) held that the poetry of the mid century was decadent and, therefore, bad. Poets who modeled themselves on Gongora were incapable of approaching his quality and their poetry became repetitious in its reliance on commonplaces and formulaic expressions, and mythological and heroic themes.
However, the Baroque manner soon encountered opposition from reformist authors whose experimentation led to the adoption of new literary models deriving from Spanish Renaissance poets and the classical authors of Greece and Rome. It is at this time that the expressions “Edad de Oro” and “Siglo de Oro” (“Golden Age”) - the latter first used in Velazquez’s Origenes de la poesia castellana (“Origins of Spanish Poetry,” 1754) - were applied to the literature of sixteenth-century Spain.
Among the first to promote new poetic standards and models was Gregorio Mayans y Siscar (1699-1781). Mayans criticized the artificiality of style and hollow verbal gymnastics of poetry which privileged meaning over form. It was the beginning of the concept of “buen gusto” (“good taste”), an idea formulated previously by Ludovico Muratori in Italy, which connoted clarity, natural forms of expression, purity of language, concision, and expressive elegance. The efforts to reform versification and the criticism of second-rate contemporary poets led to a reinterpretation of earlier poetry and the first attempts to write histories of Spanish literature. Judgment was passed on poets from the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and it is the Renaissance authors - particularly Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de Leon, the Argensola brothers, and Esteban Manuel de Villegas - who were subsequently adopted as models.
326 The Enlightenment and Neoclassicism
When Ignacio de Luzan (1702-1754) published La Poetica (“Poetics”) in 1737, he became the champion of the new poetry, rejecting the authority of Baroque models. Supporters and opponents quickly took up positions. Defenders of the Baroque tradition privileged freedom of imagination, while Neoclassicists defended the idea of rules, norms, and conventions as fundamental prerequisites of poetic composition. Debate focused on the dichotomy of Nature versus art, a pairing found in Mayans and Luzan in their advocacy of classicism and Tomas de Erauso y Zavaleta (pseudonym of Ignacio de Loyola Oyanguren, ?–TJ6^) on the side of tradition. Erauso published a text in 1750 in defense of Baroque poetry and drama, viewing Pedro Calderon de la Barca as the supreme exemplar of Baroque style.
Buy custom Literature essay, Literature term paper, Literature research paper.
