Natural Imagery and Poetic Stance in the Love Sonnets of Francisco de Rioja

Abstract

According to Pedro Salinas in Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, Garcilaso de Vega-as nation's supreme example of Renaissance poetic practice-converts impure reality into beautiful poetry, substance into concept, nature into the idea of nature.1 Jorge Guillen, in Language and Poetry, notes in the clearly Baroque Luis de G6ngora an enthusiasm for the material world to the extent that his whole soul is concentrated in five senses, in a propensity toward all that sets up a resistance to be joyously conquered.2 Searching for obscurity of expression, G6ngora relies on the very elements of the material world by describing one object in terms of another or others, thus transforming what might be called natural substance into poetic substance, or material reality into esthetic or poetic reality.3 Francisco de Rioja, whose works are Baroque in form and to some extent classical in inspiration, conceives nature as neither delicately beautiful nor superreal. Rather, he contrasts the beauty of nature with its destructive aspect. Natural imagery represents not so much nature as human emotion, and while the obscurity which marks the works of G6ngora is present in the poetry of Rioja, it is not as blatantly obscurity for its own sake as for poetic effect, as part of a literary trend and an individual poetic structure. Rioja's particular use of natural imagery within a Baroque framework leads to what Angel Valbuena Prat designates as la forma ... del estilo barroco personalisima del poeta.4 An examination of the use of natural imagery in the love