Proper Language and Language as Property: The Personal Poetics of Lope's Rimas

Abstract

Given Lope's enduring popularity and the volume of bibliography which his figure and his works have generated, the scant attention accorded to his lyric poetry is extremely perplexing. The remarkable fact is that, in 1985, we continue to do without complete scholarly editions of his verse comparable to those which make the works of his famous Golden Age contemporaries (Garcilaso, Herrera, Gongora, Quevedo, not to mention a host of lesser lights) available to us.1 A recent International Congress on Lope (Madrid, 1980) confirms a consistent bias: in its Actas, only a handful of papers address the question of Lope's lyric poetry. Of these, just two confront the lyric independent of the context of drama or of the verse-and-prose romances.2 The pattern does not always reflect a clearly negative judgment of the poems. In the prologue to