Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The inheritance
- 2 Theory and practice
- 3 Luis de Góngora: the poetry of transformation
- 4 Lope de Vega: re-writing a life
- 5 Between two centuries: from Medrano to Valdivielso
- 6 Francisco de Quevedo: the force of eloquence
- 7 The literary epic
- 8 Plenitude and decline: from Villamediana to the second half of the century
- 9 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: the end of a tradition
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The inheritance
- 2 Theory and practice
- 3 Luis de Góngora: the poetry of transformation
- 4 Lope de Vega: re-writing a life
- 5 Between two centuries: from Medrano to Valdivielso
- 6 Francisco de Quevedo: the force of eloquence
- 7 The literary epic
- 8 Plenitude and decline: from Villamediana to the second half of the century
- 9 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: the end of a tradition
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
My first idea for a book on the lines of the present one came at the end of the 1960s. In 1967, 1 had completed what professed to be a critical anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poetry – now long since, alas, out of print – which aimed at presenting something of the range, as well as the quality, of the best verse of the period, along with a brief account of Renaissance poetics and its impact in Spain. Like most anthologies, mine had its limitations: the decision to print only complete poems meant excluding a number of important longer works, and one whole genre – the literary epic – had to be omitted altogether. The next step, therefore, seemed to be a book which would make good such omissions and at the same time allow more space for discussing actual poems. Two considerations, in particular, gave conviction to the project: one was the awareness that most university students of Spanish, because of the limited nature of academic courses, were seldom encouraged to go beyond the work of a few major poets and so could have little idea of the richness of the period as a whole; the other was the wish to provide readers of other poetry of the time – English, French, Italian – with an accessible and reasonably detailed account of the corresponding Spanish poetry – in other words, to bring Spanish poetry, for all its distinctiveness, a little closer to the general European context.
Though neither of these concerns has lost its urgency, the book which has finally emerged differs from my original conception in several ways.
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- Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry , pp. xi - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993