Góngora's Heresy: Literary Theory and Criticism in the Golden Age

Abstract

Like almost every cultural phenomenon of the period, Golden Age criticism appears as a peculiar mixture of classical and Christian elements. The Horatian and Aristotelian influence is often stressed by critics in order to legitimize their views by adopting a classicist attitude. However, in order to understand Golden Age classicism, which is, in fact, not all that classicist (at least not in the general understanding of the term), we need to acknowledge its determination by what may be termed the Platonic-Christian bias of Golden Age criticism. Plato's observations in the Republic concerning the moral-ethical and ontological problem of tragic poetry'-its aesthetic qualities untold, for Plato's critique does not rely on aesthetic criteria-is, indeed, seminal if we wish to understand the particularly stern outlook of Golden Age criticism.2 In the specific cultural historical circumstances of the Counter Reformation period, when the proverbial Humanist enthusiasm with pagan literature and mythology was being contested by moralists of