Lyric Ruptures: Góngora’s Soledad primera , Lines 222–232

Abstract

Lyric Ruptures: Gongora’s Soledad primera, lines 222-232 Emilie L. Bergmann University of California, Berkeley Elias Rivers’s arrival at Johns Hopkins’s Department of Romance Languages coincided with the dramatic shift in literary studies toward a deconstructive approach, which exposed internal contradictions, uncertainties, and ruptures. This approach represented a challenge to early modern Hispanic studies, a field that had previously sought to find coherence, both formal and ideological, and continuity with tradition. Among the areas most receptive to this transformation was the study of the notoriously difficult works of Luis de Gongora y Argote, in particular his unclassifiable long poems Soledad primera and Soledad segunda. Although Rivers earned his recognition as a major early modernist for his essays and critical edition of the complete works of Garcilaso de la Vega, he had studied at Yale with the great gongorista Damaso Alonso, and he had produced important studies on the baroque poetry of Gongora as well as of Quevedo and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Those of us who were studying with him at Hopkins in 1973 shared Rivers’s excitement at the opportunity of publishing John Beverley’s groundbreaking article on Soledad primera, lines 1-61, in MLN. This essay is offered as a tribute to Rivers’s fine-tuned ear for literary resonances across the centuries and his lifelong interest in intersections of orality and textuality. If the tapestries woven of ivy and threads spun from the golden sands of the Tajo by Filodoce, Dinamene, Climene, and Nise in Garcilaso’s Egloga III exemplify the “paradox of natural art” outlined in Rivers’s 1962 article, Soledad primera offers a tapestry woven of strands from a dazzling array of classical and renaissance poems. In