Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

In Praise of Inconstancy: The Odes to Lisi of Meléndez Valdés

1991; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3828/bhs.68.1.25

1478-3398

D. Gareth Walters,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

For critics less knowledgeable about detail and less temperate in judgement than Ivy McClelland, the identification of pre-Romantic traits in eighteenth-century Spanish poetry is a hazardous task. What is viewed as evidence of a burgeoning Romantic sensibility may in fact be no more than a lingering Baroque style. This is strikingly borne out in Guillermo Carnero's anthology of pre-Romantic Spanish poetry.1 I have shown elsewhere how the Idilios of Iglesias included in this selection plagiarize Quevedo's sonnets to Lisi.2 Moreover, the poems by Vicente Garcia de la Huerta that Carnero chooses for his anthology reveal traits similar to those found in Iglesias, though in a less blatant form. They partake generously of that blend of sombre melancholy and rhetorical flourish that is a hallmark of Quevedo in particular and the seventeenth-century conceptistas in general.3 The poems of Melendez Valdes that appear in the anthology also reveal to a degree the neo-Baroque trademark. Apart from the Quevedean finger...