originality, hidden meanings and the canon: reading donne, góngora and the critics in their days...

RUTH K. CRISPIN

ORIGINALITY, HIDDEN MEANINGS AND THE CANON: READING DONNE, GONGORA AND THE CRITICS IN THEIR DAYS AND OURS

The poetries of John Donne and Luis de G6ngora no longer excite controversy; they are today universally accepted as repre- sentative of the highest manifestations of Baroque sensibility. A century ago, of course, this was not so; the same lyrics, far from sparking critical acclaim, were in fact reviled. "Sobre gustos no hay nada escrito", goes the Spanish proverb: the final word on taste has not been written. Yet the criterion of "taste" hardly provides a satisfactory explanation for the wholesale rejection, and then reha- bilitation, of an entire aesthetic. The key lies rather, I believe, in the unspoken criteria which govern canon-making, which have less to do with taste than with fundamental attitudes toward the world, toward life, and toward the works which express such attitudes. Thus this study of the canonical status of poets like Donne and Grngora will investigate the ontology implicated in the creation, refashioning and indeed interpretation(s) of the canon.

In a provocative 1988 article, Mafia Rosa Menocal challenged the uncanonical status of rock music by pointing out both that it follows the Petrarchan phenomenon of utilizing the disdained "vulgar" tongue and that its connections to the "great tradition" - - be- ginning with the troubadour trobar clus tradition - - are explicit and frequent. Although her often witty attack reflects a personal appreciation for rock, the issues Menocal raises are of course relevant not only to this particular form but also to the way in which the canon is created and the criteria for admission to it.

Menocal's assumption that rock lyrics have canonical status because their central subject is love is, however, problematic. It is

Neohelicon XXD2 Akad~mial Kiad6, Budapest John Benjarnins K V,, Amsterdam

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surely true that the canon in poetry is thematically weighted heavi- ly on the side of what is generally called love. Yet if we look to T. S. Eliot's 1945 essay, "What is a Classic?", as representing his model for canonical status, we note that the only two works he allows to qualify - - The Aeneid and The Divine Comedy - - present love not as theme but as anti-theme: of Agape, not of Eros; of duty over love. If we use Eliot's standard, then, the true canon will admit reason and not passion; or it will admit "love" for qualities other than those usually associated with the theme. In fact, it is not original to argue that Petrarch's Canzoniere is not about love, desire, passion, the adoration of the other, but solipsistically about the self; and that it derives from a tradition (the courtly love which also forms the heart of troubadour poetry) which is likewise ana- lytical and self-(specifically male self-)centered.

Like the poets of the trobar clus tradition, both John Donne in England and his near contemporary in Spain, Luis de G6ngora, wrote lyrics which consciously riddle. When Donne's secular poetry was censured, one of the central arguments against it was its imbalance or unreason, along with the inappropriateness of its "scientific" language to the presumed subject, love. Similarly, the attacks on G6ngora, even though he hardly ever made love his overt theme, center on his "excesses": the tortured syntax, obscurity and willful inventiveness and, on the other hand, his lack of moral sub- stance.

Thus Donne's love poetry is attacked because it isn't proper love poetry; G6ngora's poetry is attacked as if it were love poetry - - of the same improper sort: unreasonable, unbalanced, incom- prehensible, selfish. To their early critics the poetry is, in a word, indecorous. But behind "buzz" words like "proper" and "indecorous" lies a more profound and significant attitude, whose source ultimately is the Platonic view of art and life, the stance which separates, makes distinctions, classifies and, inevitably, excludes, and which prefers answers to questions. Erich Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis divides narrative into a Greek model and its counter, the Hebraic, according to whether its attitude toward real-

READING DONNE, GONGORA. ETC, 89

ity is classificatory, rational and problem-solving or historical, skeptical, interpretive and problematizing. The division can serve, I think, for poetry as well, and it helps us to understand the unspoken criteria which govern canon-making. ~

Of course, one might well object that Eliot w or Vergil and Dante - - and Plato don ' t need to be the only sources for a canonical model; yet in one unequivocal sense, they in fact are. Since the canonical classical model presents a world without secrets or sur- prises, a world ultimately knowable, it shows a world that seeks models, because the assumption of coherence presupposes re- peatability (and excludes idiosyncrasy, whether as originality or as "hidden" meanings)? Yet this acceptable model refuses to acknowledge fundamental ontological concerns which the unacceptable "model" foregrounds; for the knowable, repeatable world - - like Lacan 's "imaginary", or like the psychological dynamic of meta- p h o r - is a closed system, and what it excludes are time and death. The skeptical, problematizing posture, by definition historical, is rooted precisely in a recognition of temporality.

Eliot himself obliquely acknowledges this connection in "The Social Function of Poetry", which argues poetry 's civilizing purpose, and therefore its necessity, when toward the very end of the essay he says: "But what I am apprehensive of is death." What he wants to say, as the essay's next and final sentence explains, is "the death of poetry"; but what he has actually articulated permits another explanation. Eliot 's contemporary, Pedro Salinas, in a book on tradition and originality in medieval literature, says that this literature represents a struggle against death. The implication of

i Lawrence Lipking makes a similar point about what he calls the love poetry of abandonment (which would, of course, be Dido's poem, rather than Aeneas') when he explains that it is not canonizable: "... it moves freely from high to low [style], from winner's point of view to loser's[, and] by refusing to accept such distinctions [it] erode[s] the authority of the canon" (6).

2 Johnson himself recognizes this in his essay on Cowley when he describes Donne's meatphysical wit in terms of"a discordia concors .... or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike". Johnson's attitude to such a stance is, of course, critical.

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Eliot's sentence is that poetry in general has this function (as Lacan would argue all language does). That Eliot, who champions the civilized and rational in his prose, should produce a problematic, fragmented, idiosyncratic poetry, is itself less enigmatic if lyric poetry's dynamic is understood in this way.

My contention, then, is that Metaphysical/Baroque poetry and all endeavors like it, from the trobar clus to hermetic rock, are always in a sense outside the canon, because they are outside any canonical mode of thought. It follows that in periods of instability - - or perhaps rather in periods which acknowledge and indeed privi- lege instability (the Baroque and our own are examples) - - a baroque art form will emerge?

In this paper I will look first at some of the major critical statements made during or just after the lifetimes of two poets who, for much of the time since their deaths, were marginal to the canon: England's Donne (1572-1631) and Spain's G6ngora (1561-1627); my purpose will be to see how the Auerbachian taxonomy of "He- braic" and "Greek" can account for the bases of these poets' ac- ceptance or rejection. Then I will turn to the criticism which ush- ered in and followed their re-admission to the canon, early in this century, to illustrate how, within the modernist revival of the Ba- roque itself, these distinctions resurface and influence the reading and the canonical judgment of this poetry. The last portion of the paper is devoted to two twentieth-century readings of two stanzas

3 I use the term Baroque in Frank Warnke's sense: as "a generic designation for the style of the whole period which falls between the Renaissance and the neoclassi- cal era; most modern readers agree in finding a period quality in the literature of the late sixteenth century and the first two-thirds of the seventeenth..." (European 3). But I agree with Alexander A. Parker that the essence of Baroque style is wit, whose basis is metaphor in its Aristotelian definition as "an intuitive perception of the simi- larity in dissimilars" (Parker 11, 14); hence, unlike Warnke, I make no distinction between Baroque and Metaphysical styles of poetry.

I have also idiosyncratically extended the term "modernism" to cover the Span- ish contemporaries of the English modernists. Spain's poets of the 'twenties are never called "modernists" because the word "modernista" had already been applied to an earlier generation of Spanish-American poets.

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from a long poem by G6ngora, demonstrating that, as one might expect, the taxonomy may apply not only to the poet being read but also to the one doing the reading.

With the exception of Ben Jonson's isolated remarks, both in favor ("Donne is the first poet in the world for some things") and opposed ("for not keeping accent, [he] deserved hanging"),* the only available source of contemporary comment on Donne is that in the fourteen English (and one Latin) elegies reprinted by Herbert Grierson in 1912; the rest of the "criticism" consists of general statements on poetics. Some of these support the kind of poetry Donne wrote; some do not. The elegies, of course, are highly favorable, but an occasional verse makes clear that not all Donne's poetry was appreciated by all his readers. Specifically, a few of the elegists record their own or others' hesitations about the amorous verse; and it is also possible that for these "critics" the religious work includes the sermons as well as the poetry. In any case the question for the elegists does not seem to be - - as it is for the theorists - - whether poetry should be valued for its wit or its wis- dom, but rather whether love, or at least wittily treated love, is a fit subject.

Of the theorists, Peacham (1622), Alexander (1634) and Rey- nolds (1633?) may be said to line up in the metaphysical camp, but only Reynolds does so unreservedly. 5 Peacham judges Horace ap- provingly as "most acute and artificial.., wittie ... sentences ... illustrated with sundrie and rare figures", and refers to Martial's "divine wit", although he also criticizes Perseus' obscurity and Lucan's "conceits unbounded". Alexander argues that although language "is but the apparel" of poetry, its beauty but not its strength, of the three most admired elements "a wittie conceit doth harmoni-

4 Recorded in William Drummond's Conversations (1619), reprinted as a post script to Johnson's Timber in J. E. Spingam, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 1908.

s The essays, also collected in Spingam, are: Henry Peacham, "Of Poetry", from The Compleat Gentleman; Sir William Alexander, "Anacrisis"; Henry Reynolds, "Mythomystes".

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ously delight the spirits"; but he reproves Scaliger for his "aggra- vated" hyperbole. In other words, the delight in conceit of both theorists is tempered by a sense of decorum and governed by a belief in the ultimate usefulness of poetry in telling what the world is like.

Reynolds, however, writes from a truly Baroque perspective, and berates those poets who simply "peddle trivial [philosophical] wares" adorned by "fabulous rhymes"; for although poetry should be philosophical, if a poem is only that, it might as well be written in prose: poetry should be "difficult to be found out". And Reynolds' approval of riddling and obscurity is based, as we might expect, on a belief not in a rationally knowable world but in a world of hidden correspondences; as he says, the "greatest defect of modem poets" is their ignorance of the "mysteries and hidden properties of Na- ture". But among the English theorists Reynolds is an apparently minor voice. At least with respect to their later reputations, it is Jonson's voice that survives, assuring us that poetry must be clear and not riddling, that it must weave, not ravel or knot, that the study of poetry must provide a "pattemes for living well and happily", and that farfetched metaphors or unfit comparisons or too much latinizing do not serve this purpose. (Likewise Hobbes, although he is somewhat later, tells us that "the subject of poetry is the manners of men" and that poems should not offer needless difficulty or virtuosity [such as Herbert's picture poems] or obscure correspondences and rhyme.) 6

Reading these essays, one might wonder where Donne (or Herbert or Marvell, for that matter) found their audience. 7 But the theorists do not refer specifically to their contemporaries (except for Hobbes on Herbert) and it is not clear whether in fact they considered Donne obscure or "knotted", his metaphors "farfet" and his subject not providing a "patterne for living well". The elegists,

6 See Thomas Hobbes, "Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert", 1650. 7 Suckling, in his 1637 "Session of the Poets", mentions Jonson, but none of

the "Metaphysicals".

READING DONNE, GONGORA, ETC. 93

on the other hand, are writing about Donne's poetry and although the occasion fairly well assures approbation and even panegyric, still the very quantity of those gathered (Grierson calls them "an impressive collection") suggests that they are not isolated voices. For these elegists Donne is the examplepar excellence of wit, which, now that he is dead is, in the words of fully half of them, "wid- dowed", "witlesse", "speechlesse", "dumbe". Only a single elegist remarks on his breadth of knowledge. Several mention his religious poetry, usually in preference to the secular, though only one, Chudleigh, limits his praise to it (saying that Donne "brought wit home to pietie"); only one sees fit to single out the earlier love poetry for specific praise. None mentions obscurity or clarity; none, hidden realms of knowledge. Virtually all the praise is directed to the language as wit, invention, fancy. Two set Donne's art over that of nature; two make allusions to specific Donne poems; several attempt conceits themselves (none more "farfet" than Thomas Browne's description of the amorous verse, Donne's "looser rap- tures", as the uncircumcised "foreskinne of the phansie"); but only one actually suggests that Donne be imitated. Several are, rather, at pains to tell us, directly or indirectly, that such an enterprise is futile: Donne is dead and with him, wit; Donne is inimitable.

Plainly, Donne did not seem obscure to these writers, and one might then wonder whether it is inappropriate to assume that the theorists had Donne in mind. It also seems clear that the clever language is perceived by the elegists to be in the service of something worthwhile, which in many cases - - but certainly not in all

seems to be religion; and that the love poetry is for the majority (Browne is one of three exceptions) at the least not a stumbling block to Donne's supremacy or even "immortality" (Arthur Wilson's word). Yet it seems equally clear, despite the hyperbole in which the praise is couched, that these men think Donne's language goes beyond cleverness; that they perceive Donne to be working something extraordinary on the language (Carew says it explicitly: "to the awe of thy wit/our stubborne language bends"); that Donne is, in this regard - - and this is perhaps the common

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denominator, the major criterion for praise --- an original. This then would be where Donne would come a cropper with Ben Jonson and the other theorists, for what is original is not repeatable, can- not serve as model, neither one for living well and happily nor even one for making poetry.

In Spain the battle lines were more sharply drawn, with G6n- gora's poetry its particular focus. The publication of the "F~ibula de Polifemo y Galatea" in 1612 and, more especially, hisSoledades (Solitudes) in 1613 - - the lengthy twin apogees of his ultrabaroque style s - - provoked a voluminous reaction. Probably the most significant of the anti-Gongorists, Juan de J~uregui, published a booldength vehement attack (Antfdoto contra la pestilente poesfa de las Soledades, 1614), which was at once followed by equally fervent defenses by Fernandez de C6rdoba and Dfaz de Rivas ; 9 and these were not the only such works. In addition the other major poets took up arms: Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), most vitriolically in (versified) protest, and Lope de Vega (1562-1635) with poems both against and in praise? ~

For the most part this argument also centered on language. In Spain, where for a hundred years poetic language was commonly understood by theorists and poets alike to define itself by its inventiveness", where all poets, even those opposed to G6ngora and

s Spanish baroque poetry used traditionally to be divided into two categories, the culteranista, which is latinizing, syntactically difficult and interested in metaphor, or decoration, for its own sake; and the conceptista, whose word plays are bound up with ideas. More recently most critics have realized that virtually every seventeenth-century poet was both "culteranist" and "conceptist", and that these are complementary forms of a single artistic phenomenon. For a concise discussion, see Parker's introduction to the Polyphemus.

9 The Examen delAntfdoto, also in 1614, and the Respuesta delAntldoto, written in 1618 and published in 1622.

1o According to John Beverley, who refers to lines in La Galatea, G6ngora was Cervantes' favorite poet. Lorca also cites a flattering tercet by Cervantes in his lec- ture on G6ngora.

11 Since the 1580 publication of Medina's prologue to the frrst commentary on Garcilaso de la Vega's poetry, which served as a manifesto for the influential Sevillian school of poets.

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even those considered "classicists" made abundant use of conceits, the dispute seems to be whether G6ngora's extravagant and difficult use of language was so inventive as to actually mean anything. J~uregui jumps on the smallest indiscretion of fact (why "Solitudes", he asks of the title, when in fact the shipwrecked protagonist spends most of his time among people; and why say that a magnet turns toward the most brilliant star when the North star is not the bright- est) to greater defects: that the main character's name, background and motive for appearing are nowhere given, for instance, or that the language takes too many liberties, disdains all severity, is re- petitive of metaphor and vocabulary. But all these are countered, point by tedious point, by his defenders, making one wonder whether the very vehemence and pettiness of the attack does not conceal some other, more basic argument. 12

As for the poets, Quevedo - - always admired for his satiric poetic wit n circulated verses such as the "Aguja de navegar culto, con la receta para hacer 'Soledades' en un dia" ("Compass for Navi- gating Affectedly, with the Recipe for Making 'Solitudes' in a Sin- gle Day"), which consists of latmisms strung together like beads and joined with a convoluted (Gongoresque) syntax: the result is precisely the non-sense of which his attackers accused G6ngora) 3 Lope wrote anti-"culteranist" sonnets, sometimes specifically anti- Gongoristic and, in part, probably personally motivated (as Quevedo himself may have been~4); but at the height of his career he dedicated at least two sonnets of adulation to him (poems which, like others of the same period, imitate culteranist style). Quevedo, too,

12 This in fact occurs again in the 1660s with another attack and response. 13 Like Donne's, incidentally, Quevedo's reputation after his death, and until his

revival along with that of G6ngora, rested on his satirical poetry; like Donne's, his love lyrics and "meditative" poetry were reevaluated and considered superior to the satires by the poets and critics of the 1920s and after, at least in the Spanish-speaking world. As with Donne, an important criterion for judging poetry swerved away from content and toward "aesthetic" considerations in tandem with the loss of credence in a knowable universe, and in literature's role in explaining or revealing it.

14 See Andrte Collard, Nueva poesfa, Chapter 1, passim, G6ngora was thought by many to have Jewish ancestry.

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in a significant proportion of his lyric poetry uses a convoluted syntax, even if not exactly with all the peculiarities of G6ngera's trademark style, and a plethora of latinisms. Finally, Baltasar Gra- ci~.n's Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Creativity; 1642, 1648), a canonical work from its publication on, supplies the fullest theoretical justification for Spanish baroque invention (or wit, or conceit, or daring metaphor), applied with approbation to the early seventeenth century poets. Gracifin does not deal principally with Gtngora 's poetry but he does praise him, and he cites Gtngora far more frequently than he cites anyone else) 5

But Grac i~ is important not simply because he is on the side of wit, even wit tending to obscurity, but also because he bases his partisanship on a theory of correspondences, developed out of Giordano Bruno's anti-Petrarchan (hence anti-Platonic) idea of poetic inspiration) 6 Bruno rejects the ladder-of-love theory, in which human beauty inspires the poet toward the divine, and offers in- stead an idea of "heroic love" through which the poet perceives the "unity of dissimilars" in the universe and thus produces a poetry which, to cite Jonson again, "yokes heterogeneous elements". It is this idea which, according to critics from Bruno to Mazzeo, ac- counts for and justifies the daring and often obscure and meta- phorical language play which so disturbed Gtngora 's detractors; and it is quite possible this idea which (at a perhaps less than conscious level) is anathema to them. Not merely the zeal of Jfiuregui but also his insistence on picayune details that seem to fly in the face of reason suggest a cast of mind more classical than baroque.

And again, as with Donne, and revealing an anti-classical perspective, an important element in the praise of G6ngora is his in- imitability. This is Lope's conclusion in the adulatory sonnet in which he says that the defenders of G6ngora have only added "vile foam to his immense seas" ("dando a tu inmenso mar viles espu-

15 Of G6ngora, Graci~in says, for example, "Aqutl que fue cisne, fue ~guila, fue ftnix en lo canoro, en lo agudo yen lo extremado" ("He who was a swan, was an eagle, was a phoenix for his melodiousness, his wit and his excesses").

16 See Joseph Andrew Mazzeo's essay in Clements.

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mas") and that G6ngora's imitators - - Icaruses to G6ngora's divine sun - - have burned their feathers in his divine light. And it is what Espinoso Medrano says explicitly in 1642, explaining why G6ngora has no worthy imitators: "This is what is singular and estimable about him, like the sun, who admits no successful com- petition; this is the value of the unique" ("la valentia de lo singular"). To the classicist the value is not in the singular but in the general and universal. To the classicist, then, G6ngora, like Donne, is unacceptable because he provides no clear and meaningful gloss on life, no "patteme".

T. S. Eliot's early essays were of paramount importance in the formation of, and to some extent the debate on, the interpretation of Donne and of metaphysical poetry in general in the first part of this century. ~7 This is in part because Eliot, having found in Donne's poetry in particular a mirror in which he could see his own, offered a description which fit not only seventeenth century but modem poetry as well. He justified (explicitly against Samuel Johnson's indictment) the readmission of metaphysical poetry into the canon for possessing certain traits essential for poetry: "their virtue", he says, "was ... something valuable which disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared"; and that virtue is the result of a mind (that of the "perfectly equipped" poet) which, in the well-known phrase, "constantly amalgamates disparate experience" to form "new wholes". (Eliot's definition in "The Metaphysical Poets", followed by examples such as cooking smells and typing sounds, could be a description of his own "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" or the Tiresias section of The Waste Land.) Eliot went on to develop a theory (which he later modified and which other critics both took up and attacked) about the "disassociation of sensibility" which supposedly dates from after these seventeenth century poets, pre- venting later artists from amalgamating their diverse experiences and uniting "the most heterogeneous ideas". He thus praises Donne

1~ "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) is probably the most crucial; also relevant is "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920, 1928).

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for "the direct apprehension of thought", the "re-creation of thought into feeling", and pits this achievement against both the sentimen- talism of the eighteenth and the scientific ratiocination of the nineteenth century, setting up as the ideal a truth which is strictly poetic or imaginative, in which language, as "the verbal equivalent of states of mind and feeling", is the expression of the inner self.

Likewise Cleanth Brooks saw in Donne's use of paradox a kind of truth opposed to that of science, a truth made of intuition and imagination and words, resistant to reason and unverifiable except by a kin intuition on the part of the reader, is Paradox occupies a realm in which, according to Brooks' interpretation, disunities are resolved; it is thus a kind of realm of correspondences. Although I would argue that Donne's poetry refuses the resolution of the paradox, a position John Guillory also seems to be taking when he attacks the implicit ideology of the Brooks essay, Brooks' point is not thereby necessarily invalidated. ~9 Both Brooks and Eliot, according to Guillory, are compelled by their own classical natures to an "orthodox" reading of Donne; this is probably true and goes far toward explaining what otherwise might (at least for Eliot) prove conflicting values between his prose and his poetry, or between the chaotic fragments of The Waste Land and its drive toward other- worldly reconciliation. But it remains true that Brooks and Eliot recognize (and approve) in the violent yoking and in the disparities of imagery a posture which acknowledges difference.

Some such understanding of Donne's poetry is common, and has been so, since Eliot-wrote in the 1920s. Much of it has apparently gone as assumed truth, not needing exposition and defense (this is how Dame Helen Gardner explains the paucity of such criticism). But Mario Praz in 1931, and in fact Hugh Kenner as late as 1984, were suggesting a similar reason for the metaphysical re-

~g See "The Language of Paradox" in The Well-Wrought Urn, originally published in 1942 and collected in Clements.

19 For the Guillory essay ("The Ideology of Canon Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks"), see Hallberg.


vival? ~ Praz, whose essay is principally concerned with the larger Baroque literary world which Donne would have known, and especially in contrasting Donne with Marino 21, points out as well how Eliot's defense of Donne as the sensuous apprehender of thought approximates Henri Peyre's description of Baudelaire's inspiration: "L'idre n'est jamais absente des Fleurs du mal mais [elle] ne cherche que bien rarement s'abstraire; elle arrive portre par la sen- sation" (Qu'est-ce que 66). Baudelaire, of course, as the forerunner of the symbolists (and as inheritor, via Swedenborg, of the Renais- sance doctrine of correspondences), believed, as Henri Peyre says, that "everything is hieroglyphic", that comparisons and metaphors are called up "out of the depths of the universal analogy", that his goal as poet is "to arrive at the spiritual hidden within the material and that is the generative cause of appearances"; to seek an "ulte- rior meaning" (What is 26). Kenner, speaking of Donne's "The Ecstasie", reminds us that the twisted eyebeams of the lovers seem less "remote from physical reality" in the age of the X-ray and the electron, with its "technology of the invisible" and of "mysterious energies" (368). Thus for Kenner too the connection has to do with esoteric knowledge, as he compares the modem technological world of the twentieth century to the universe of correspondences on which the Baroque art of Donne (and of Grngora) seems to be based.

One of the first voices of dissent to the Donne reappraisal is C. S. Lewis' 1938 essay, "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century", a good example of the classical attitude. Lewis' most severe indictment is that the love poetry has no value: it gets its message across well, but the message is not worth having, consist- ing as it does of "a chaos of violent and transitory passions" which "cuts him off from the deeper and more permanent spring of his

20 For the Praz essay ("Donne's Relation to the Poetry of his Time"), see Gardner's book; for Kenner's ("The Making of the Modernist Canon"), see Hallberg.

21 Marino, says Praz, is interested principally in the effect of the individual concetto; Donne, in the dialectic of the poem which uses the concetti. In this, Donne is more like the Spanish poets, whose work he might conceivably known, as Redpath, for example, illustrates.

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own excitement" (all the adjectives are revealing of Lewis' bias). The poetry is, he says, complex only on the surface. Equally damn- ing for him is that Donne's is a realist's, not an idealist's, truth. Unlike Marvell's "Coy Mistress" (which, as Lewis admits, would not have been written without Donne's example), Donne's love poetry lacks the aura of "golden tranquility" to which the MarveU poem's "grimness" and argumentation are subordinated. Golden tranquility suggests, among other things, golden mean, aristocratic virtue and leisure, permanent value. As Lewis himself explains, Donne is original, and "originality, in the vulgar sense~ has [...] the shortest life". Idealization, stability, permanence: the classicist's urgent defense against "the shortest life" - - which is to say, against life. 22 For passion and chaos imply change, change informs life, and life implies death; and all of this the classical view must ex- clude. 23

Although her important book is considerably later than the modernist period, Rosamund Tuve' s stance, especially as it is expressed toward Eliot, is also revelatory of the basic difference I have been drawing. Tuve seeks to undo those judgments that regard seventeenth-century poetry as if it were modem poetry. Admitting that Eliot's descriptions fit his own work, and modem poetry in general, she nevertheless insists that one must judge poetry by the criteria of its time, and that sixteenth and seventeenth century poems obeyed a fairly rigorous rhetorical ideal, governed by logic; and that even the wildest images make sense not as intuitions, or sensuous apprehensions of thought, but strictly as rationally coher- ent "by conscious design" (168). Tuve's argument privileges rea-

22 It is perhaps no accident that in this brief essay (also collected in Clement) the idea of shortened life is articulated no fewer than three times.

23 Cleanth Brooks made the same point recently when discussing "To His Coy Mistress", Compared to Catullus' writing in the same carpe diem vein, he says of the Marvell poem that it "is surely not precisely classical". "There is no graveworm in Catullus", Brooks points out; Catullus reminds Lesbia only that they will both even- tually have to relinquish this world for an eternal sleep. Catullus' warning is at worst "somber", with none of the grimly powerful physicality (the three terms are Brooks') evoked by Marvell 's Baroque poem (Historical 101),

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son not only because she attributes this quality to the Elizabethans and Metaphysicals, but because it is a reasonable thing to judge the causes and effects of a style by the known standards of those being judged. Eliot, on the other hand, is using a very different kind of procedure, stemming from the idea (which may well have origi- nated with him, but which has been embraced by postmodem critics in the form later expressed by Jorge Luis Borges) that authors invent their own precursors. 24 And this idea itself assumes a cos- mos of correspondences in which writers can move, in defiance of all reason, back and forth in their dissimilar times and space, meta- morphosed, recreated, united by occult underlying similarities.

Everything is hieroglyphic, and the poet's job is to interpret, or translate - - said Baudelaire, and Emerson before him; and it is quite possibly what Donne thought, and perhaps even more probably what G6ngora did.

Marcelino Menrndez y Pelayo's vast, erudite and humanistic work of the late nineteenth century, Historia de las ideas est~ticas en Espa~a, was the last influential anti-Gongorist statement in SpainY The seventeenth-century revival began gradually, as it had in England, but climaxed more dramatically, in 1927. Shortly before G6ngora's tricentennial, a group of young poets in Madrid - - all of whom were to become celebrated as the "Generation of 1927", some of whom would also become critics, few of whom had as yet read, much less studied, G6ngora's poe t ry- - decided to commemo- rate the occasion, both festively and seriously, and planned an ambitious series of scholarly and popularizing projects: editions,- "transliterations" into prose, studies and lectures, as well as inter- views, manifestations, and a banquet. 26 Not all of the projects got completed, or even begun; but Diimaso Alonso did produce the

24 The phrase occurs in Borges' "Kafka y sus precursores", published in Buenos Aires in 1952.

25 Menrndez y Pelayo devotes a lengthy section of the work's second volume to G6ngora, whose work he ultimately dismisses as "poetic nihilism".

26 The Spanish Baroque was represented, in this revival, not only by G6ngora, although his anniversary was the catalyst and he the clearest star, but also by Quevedo, as mentioned above, and a host of lesser but worthy poets.

102 RUTH K. CRISPIN

first, and unsurpassed prosification of the Soledades along with a perceptive reading of it (he later did the same for the Polifemo); Federico Garcfa Lorca gave a successful talk, later published, ex- plicating the use of metaphor in the poem; and the various efforts at publicity indeed raised literary and even public awareness about the value of the Spanish Baroque; some years later, too, when Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guill6n wrote books on Spanish poetry, each dedicated a chapter of admiring analysis to G6ngora. 27

The 1927 effort did not spawn any significant antagonists. In- stead, the interesting and curious fact is that even the more "classical" of these poets were able to accommodate a positive reaction to G6ngora. At least on the surface, the Generation of '27 were not a school or movement, and despite their personal and intellectual intimacy and their closeness to other avant-garde artists and phi- losophers, each wrote in his own distinctive style. Lorca, for example, exploited metaphor in original ways in his exploration of the mythic worlds of the gypsy or the American black; Salinas used a conversational voice and conceit rather than metaphor to interrogate self and other, or self and society; Guill6n aspired to a "pure poetry" in the tradition of Val6ry and tended toward me- tonymy and other rhetorical devices, along with a spare, rigorously stanzaic structure and a classical sense of the accessibility of meaning. 28 Yet although Lorca's and Salinas' intent is always to find hidden meanings, even Guill6n' s controlled revelations proving that "ali 's right with the world" function by a kind of unveiling which implies mystery, even though the mystery turns out to have been present all along. What unites these diverse poets, and what makes them sensitive to G6ngora, is, first, that they seek to uncover and reveal, and, second, that they do not see language as a transparent

27 In both cases, the books derived from a series of lectures which each gave at American universities, Salinas at Johns Hopkins in 1937, Guill6n at Harvard in 1957- 1958.

28 The Generation included other important poets, such as Rafael Alberti and the Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre.


conduit to knowledge but rather as a plastic medium. 29 For all these critics what counts - - and counted - - for G6ngora is language. The difference is the purpose to which the medium is molded; and a contrast Guill6n and Salinas will clearly show the distinction.

Salinas' main point in his book, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Literature, is that G6ngora's language "exalts" reality, that the "narrative" of the Soledades is just a pretext for the book's true subject: the real, external world as alpha and omega, not mimetically represented but magnified because the material real is insufficient. This is plenitude, not nihilism, he says, countering Men6ndez y Pelayo; and it functions to stave off knowledge of the passage of time by multiplying labyrinthicity - - never linearity - - with language. Its difficulty is inseparable from its value, he argues, citing the fol- lowing stanza from the Soledades:

Pasaron todos pues, y regulados cual en los equinocios surcar vemos los pi61agos del aire libre algunas volantes no galeras, sino grullas veleras, tal vez creciendo, tal menguando lunas sus distantes extremos, caracteres tal vez formando alados en el papel d igano del cielo las plumas de su vuelo.

Thereon all passed, arranged the company, As the Equinox we furrowing see The high seas of the air No flying galleys' hulls But the swift-sailing gulls, Sometimes like moons that either wax or wane Distant the extremes of their band they bear, At other times winged characters they feign Upon the sky diaphanous to write As parchment, for the feathers of their flight2 ~

29 Guill6n, for example, contrasts the mystic verse of Saint John of the Cross with that of authentic poetry. "Poetry", he says, "... is established first of all 'a language'" (quotation marks in text; italics mine); whereas for Saint John, trying to com- municate an ineffable experience, language was the "final inadequate recourse" (31).

3o The translation is by E. M. Wilson.

104 RUTH K. CRISPIN

Precisely because G6ngora is dissatisfied with material reality he must destroy it and then recreate it, to make a new, a poetic reality, Salinas tells us. And the convoluted layers thus produced prevent the reader from easily finding his way, from, indeed, find-

ing any way which leads finally, inevitably, and at the last clearly, to the end. And yet, of course, the creation (and recognition) of such a labyrinthine reality of images exposes the very desire of detour which is at its heart.

For Guill6n too G6ngora's language is "an inexhaustible mine of words" to be exploited; and his chapter illustrates and explains the specific ways in which the Cordoban poet does this. 3~ G6ngora is an architect; he "wrestles with movement until he imprisons it in

substantial masses of repose". For G6ngora, "the object dominates everything; and to the objectivity of theme, concepts and method corresponds the most suitable style, one of resplendently sumptu- ous materiality". Here is the stanza that elicited this judgment, a description of a wrestling match:

Abrazfironse, pues, los dos, y luego - - humo anhelando el que no suda fuego - - de reciprocos nudos impedidos cual duros olmos de implicantes vides, yedra el uno es tenaz del otto muro. Mafiosos, al fin hijos de la tierra, cuando fuertes no Alcides, procuran derribarse y, derribados, cual pinos se levantan arraigados en los profundos senos de la sierra.

The one embraced the other next, and then - - one panted smoke, the other fiery glowed - - The double knot thwarted their joint intent (Like the tough elms with clinging vines around), One, ivy, hung upon the other, wall. A dexterous Antaeus either bent If no strong Hercules; contrived to fall, and fallen, like the rugged pine to rise Deep rooted in the bosom of the earth. 32

31 Op. cit. 32 Guill6n, too, offers the translation by E. M. Wilson, but follows it with D~rnaso

Alonso's ground-breaking prose rendition: "They embraced each other and then - -

READING DONNE, GONGORA, ETC, 105

About the stanza Gui l l tn says:

Only one metaphor indicates change: the one about smoke and fire. Of the wrestling match itself, nothing remains but two motionless positions. We see the two athletes stopped in mid-movement: first, when their holds so neutral- ize each other that they seem to be a vine on an elm in the form of a "knot". They are already "thwarted". But the poet is not satisfied with this reduction of two exertions to stability of a vegetable nature, and he continues: "One, ivy, hung upon the other, wall". Ivy, wall. The solidification is complete. The second time, the two youths are lying on the ground. "Fallen", they do not stir. As soon as they arise, they could be called "pine trees", pines that are "rooted". The action has almost been made to disappear by sleight of hand. G6ngora conceives a whole conjugation of activity thus: knot, elms, clinging vines, ivy, wall, pine, rooted, bosom of the earth, Thus G6ngora wrestles with movement until he imprisons it in substantial masses of repose.

For Guil l tn, as his perceptively admiring analysis of this small

section of the poem shows, "G6ngora is a passionate admirer of

the beauty of the world; so absorbing is the cult of Beauty that one does not see the worshipper; she alone triumphs. Everything glori-

fies the object". Although Gui l l tn ends his chapter quoting Salinas on the exaltation of reality, he obviously does not see that concept as being the recreation of a new (poetic) reality, nor does he admit

to an ultimate purpose: the staving off of time and death. For Guil l tn,

rather, death and life are both excluded from the poetry, which is

"frozen", "immobilized", not subject to decay, from which the hu-

man observer disappears and only the object, clear and hard, re-

mains. Both G6ngora and his critics have been reevaluated since mid-

century, most originally by the Marxist John Beverley, whose the-

sis is that G6ngora 's "true subject" in the Soledades is not material reality, not language, but the social and economic situation in the

the one who is not sweating fire seeming at least to be belching smoke - - thwarted by the double knot, like tough elms with their clinging vines, one is tenacious ivy to the wall the other presents. If they were not strong Hercules, they were at least cunning sons of the earth (i. e., like Antaeus, son of the earth, who when he fought with Hercules acquired new strength each time he touched the ground) who try to throw each other, and once thrown, rise up again like pines rooted in the deep bosom of the earth."

106 RUTH K. CRISPIN

post-Armada, collapsing empire that was Spain in the seventeenth century. 33 I find much of his evidence convincing (he points out, for instance, that the structure of the poem corresponds on one level to Ovid's four ages, and shows their references to the politi- cal geography and the corruption of the contemporary "iron age"). He also interprets the pilgrim-protagonist as G6ngora himself, flee- ing the dissolute court in Madrid to retire to the bucolic scene of his native C6rdoba, thus making the poem a private as well as a public kind of expression. Beverley does not, of course, deny the obscurity in which all this is couched, nor does he specifically account for it. But as I see it, the obscurity, masking - - for Beverley m a hidden analogy, is properly paralleled by the marginality to mainstream criticism of the reading? 4 Beverley's intention is certainly not to dislodge G6ngora from the canon which has at last made room for him. On the contrary, he - - like Menocal with rock

is making a case for an orthodox canonical reading, in which G6ngora's supposedly hermetic poem turns out to be a pattern for governing the polis and living well.

I 'm not sure I can agree with the latter, but I suspect that some of my sympathy toward Beverley's position comes from my con- viction that the Spanish, like the English Baroque - - and in contrast to, for example, Renaissance poetry - - seeks knowledge of a different order, a knowledge whose truths are revealed by poetry and language rather than by the visible world; and that its urgency is not simply to create art (as one might argue for a work like Sidney's Astrophil and Stella) but to manipulate with art. In sum, that it is, to belabor the point, dynamic, vital, skeptical and other; not ideal, not classical, not decorous ~ and, very often, like the barbarian other, not welcome.

33 The analysis was first published by Purdue in 1971 as Aspects of G6ngora's Soledades. I used the shorter version which prefaces his edition of the poem.

None of the seventeenth-century discussion surrounding the poem even re- motely hints at an interpretation like Beverley's.

READING DONNE. GONGORA. ETC.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

107

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1946. Trans. by Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953).

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Univ. of Missouri Press, 1991). Collard, AndrEe, Nueva poesla: conceptismo y culteranismo en la crftica espa~ola

(Madrid: Castalia, 1967). Clements, A. L. (ed.), John Donne's Poetry (New York: Norton, 1966). Eliot, T. S., On Poetry andPoets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957). - - , The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1928). Espinosa Medrano, Juan de, Apologgtico (en favor de don Luis de Gdngora). Trans.

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1912). Guillrn, Jorge, Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain. Trans. by Ruth Whittredge

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(Madrid, 1883). Menocal, Maria Rosa, "We Can't Dance Together". Profession, 88 (1988): 53-58. Mico, Jose M., La fragua de Las Soledades: ensayo sobre Grngora (Barcelona:

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Interpretation of a Baroque Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1977). Peyre, Henri, Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme ? (Paris: Pressess Universitaires de France,

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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940). - - , Jorge Manrique: 0 tradicion y originalidad (Buenos Aires: SudamErica, 1947).

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Spingarn, J. E., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908).

Sutton, W. - R. Foster, Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York: Odys- sey, 1963).

Tuve, Rosemund, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth Century Critics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947).

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originality, hidden meanings and the canon: reading donne, góngora and the critics in their days...

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