Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to Volume 1
- 1 A brief history of the history of Spanish American Literature
- 2 Cultures in contact: Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the European written tradition
- 3 The first fifty years of Hispanic New World historiography: the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America
- 4 Historians of the conquest and colonization of the New World: 1550–1620
- 5 Historians of the colonial period: 1620–1700
- 6 Colonial lyric
- 7 Epic poetry
- 8 Spanish American theatre of the colonial period
- 9 Viceregal culture
- 10 The eighteenth century: narrative forms, scholarship, and learning
- 11 Lyric poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 12 Spanish American theatre of the eighteenth century
- 13 The nineteenth-century Spanish American novel
- 14 The brief narrative in Spanish America: 1835–1915
- 15 The Spanish American theatre of the nineteenth century
- 16 The essay in Spanish South America: 1800 to Modernismo
- 17 The essay of nineteenth-century Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
- 18 The gaucho genre
- Index
- Bibliographies
- References
6 - Colonial lyric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to Volume 1
- 1 A brief history of the history of Spanish American Literature
- 2 Cultures in contact: Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the European written tradition
- 3 The first fifty years of Hispanic New World historiography: the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America
- 4 Historians of the conquest and colonization of the New World: 1550–1620
- 5 Historians of the colonial period: 1620–1700
- 6 Colonial lyric
- 7 Epic poetry
- 8 Spanish American theatre of the colonial period
- 9 Viceregal culture
- 10 The eighteenth century: narrative forms, scholarship, and learning
- 11 Lyric poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 12 Spanish American theatre of the eighteenth century
- 13 The nineteenth-century Spanish American novel
- 14 The brief narrative in Spanish America: 1835–1915
- 15 The Spanish American theatre of the nineteenth century
- 16 The essay in Spanish South America: 1800 to Modernismo
- 17 The essay of nineteenth-century Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
- 18 The gaucho genre
- Index
- Bibliographies
- References
Summary
Spain occupied the New World as the Spanish language was undergoing its last significant linguistic revolution and Spanish poetry its most profound and lasting change. Perhaps this coincidence explains the pervasive presence of poetry during the Conquest, as well as in the viceregal societies created as a result of colonization. In the sixteenth century, Spanish poetry was in the midst of a feverish renewal, adopting the style and spirit derived from Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance, and elevating its traditional forms, notably the romancero, to written and printed expression. At the same time as the Italianate style was being adopted, the inherited medieval poetics of the courtly cancioneros, and the ballads of the romancero, endured, proliferated, and contaminated the new poetry. Changes in poetry, as in all else in the Spanish sixteenth century, meant more often than not an uneasy coexistence of medieval and renaissance ideas and practices. The resiliency of the Medieval is one of the elements that led, in due time, to the style that characterizes colonial lyric, which is the Baroque.
But the renewal was radical enough. Perhaps the most profound change, because it affected the very rhythm of poetic language itself, and its distinction from everyday speech, was the adoption of the eleven-syllable line. The hendecasyllable became the standard for cultivated poetry, in contrast to the shorter lines used for ballads, other popular verse, and in cancionero poems, like the ones written by Hernando Colón, the Discoverer’s son (Varela, “La obra poética de Hernando Colón”).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature , pp. 191 - 230Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
References
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