Quevedo Against "Culteranismo": A Note on Politics and Morality

Abstract

The attacks and defenses associated with G6ngora's began in 1613, as soon as the manuscripts of the Polifemo and the Primera Soledad had reached Madrid. In his catalogue of polemical texts, however, Jammes lists 38 different items before reaching Quevedo's first documented intervention (676): his witty Aguja de navegar cultos, con la receta para hacer Soledades en un dia, written in 1625 and published in 1631. Jammes adds this comment: Merece quizas reflexi6n el caracter tardio de la aparicion de Quevedo en esta palestra. It seems that Quevedo was disturbed not so much by G6ngora's own major poems as by the fact that ten years later, about the time of G6ngora's death, the high new style was being explicated by scholars and widely imitated by many other poets; he saw this dominant literary vogue as yet another component in the moral, social, and cultural corruption of his country. Shortly after 1625 we find similar parodic and burlesque treatments of culteranismo in his Discurso de todos los diablos, o infierno enmendado, written in 1627 and published in 1628, and in his La culta latiniparla, catecisma de vocablos para instruir a las mujeres cultas y hembrilatinas (1629). But in these satirical pieces, full of wit and sarcastic humor, Quevedo, as Jammes remarks (684), hardly mentions G6ngora by name or uses such words as gongorizar or gongorismo; Jammes (676-77) furthermore questions the authenticity of several poems attacking G6ngora more personally. In that same year of 1629 Quevedo, with no mention at all of G6ngora by name, wrote a serious, scholarly critique of the new style, an earnest critical onslaught to be found in the preliminary pages of his editions of poetry by