Muses and Masks: Some Classical Genres of Spanish Poetry
by Elias L. Rivers
Assuming genres to be the central objects of systematic literary study, Professor Rivers shows that distinctions between verse and prose, literature and non-literature, and among the varying genres of literature have pragmatic roots in the conventional social practices of different societies and that all such distinctions change and evolve historically.
Applying these premises to Spanish poetry in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, the author chooses three different kinds of poetry to illustrate different ways of defining and analyzing historical genres. The sonnet is defined primarily by its material form of fourteen lines arranged in given rhyme schemes; certain topoi or clusters of meaning were developed in dialogic, syllogistic or other ways within this metric form.
The verse epistle, on the other hand, may be defined as a form of written discourse in which one person addresses another at some degree of removal in space and time; although blank verse was occasionally used, terza rima, lending itself to epigrammatic sententiousness, became standard as the metrical form for epistles, whether personal news letters or lofty moral discourse. Finally, the Spanish silva was invented at the beginning of the 17th century at two different levels: on the one hand, the metrical silva was an irregularly rhymed sequence of seven- and eleven-syllable lines and, on the other, the classical silva was a very loosely defined genre in the tradition of the Latin poet Statius. Góngora's Soledades and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Sueño were the culminations of a highly original and typically Hispanic genre, the silva as third-person narrative or a journey or dream.
University of California, Irvine, Hispanic Studies, No. 1
120 pp.