Lope Defending Poetry vs. Lope Writing Poetry: The Conflicts of "donde habla amor puro"

Abstract

Lope's defense of poetry, Cuesti?n del honor debido a la poes?a, has attracted little attention from scholars, due in no small part to the difficulty of reading a text that appears overburdened with excessive catalogs and recondite allusions, but also to its deceptive patina of counter-reformation moralism resolutely displayed in the form of a rhetorical exercise. It is my reading that Lope, rather than merely adopting panegyric convention aligned with moral conservatism, entertained more pragmatic motives stemming from a need to jus? tify Spanish amorous poetry under insistent moral attack, and more significantly to claim validity for his own love poetry (donde habla amor puro Epistolario III: 330). Lope's Platonism both in defending and writing poetry was compromised, however, when it came into conflict with his literary embraces of eros and the imposition of a Scholastic-Aristotelian psychology. In effect Lope's discurso can be considered a conventional yet ambivalent early reflection on poetics, rhetoric and literary theory.1