Lyric poetry is rife with examples of male lovers who pine after distant or uninterested female beloveds. In the early-modern period, frustrated male desire generated reams of verse, much of it mediocre, while some has been of startling beauty and influence. For women, to be the object of frustrated male desire has always been a perilous affair even in the reified context of a poem. Felipe Valencia’s recent monograph explores precisely this nexus between frustrated male desire as melancholy, gender violence, and the lyric tradition in Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Valencia rightfully highlights the importance of this period, which he calls the “Age of Góngora,” to the development of lyric poetry as a distinct and privileged poetic genre alongside drama and epic. It is in relation to epic poetry that early-modern lyric poets measured and weighed their worth, a genre dispute with gendered dimensions in Valencia’s telling. Poets like Fernando de Herrera, Juan de Arguijo, and Luis de Góngora dedicated themselves to redefining Italianate lyric poetry as masculine and even heroic at a time when the epic tradition set the standards for male identity and poetic prowess. In this regard, Valencia deftly ties together Leah Middlebrook’s insights on Herrera’s lyric masculinity with Mercedes Blanco’s epic reading of Góngora. The gender anxiety of lyric poets in an epic context constituted a crucial part of what Valencia calls a melancholic poetics in early-modern Spain that was “simultaneously displayed and constructed—that is, performed—through symbolic violence against women” (18).Early-modern melancholic masculinity with its links to gender violence and lyric expression is described by Valencia as beginning with Garcilaso towards the start of the sixteenth century and culminating with Góngora in the early seventeenth century. The book’s introduction lays out the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the link between melancholic masculinity and lyric expression. There, Valencia uses Garcilaso’s sonnet, “A Daphne ya los brazos le crecían,” to illustrate how lyric production was interwoven with gender violence from its Castilian inception. The subsequent first chapter demonstrates how even an arch-epic poet like Alonso de Ercilla had a developed understanding of lyric poetry as a distinct poetic style with its own subject matter: “In La Araucana, the spectacle of female suffering and irreparable loss constitute the stuff of lyric” (84). The second chapter focuses on Fernando de Herrera’s Algunas obras (1582) and the poet’s understanding of lyric “in dialectic with the epic” (94). Here, Valencia claims that Herrera’s lyric masculinity requires the “victimization of the female beloved as a necessary step for the accomplishment of the poetic project” (111). The third chapter turns to Miguel de Cervantes’s pastoral novel La Galatea (1585) to highlight again “the masculinist aims of the pastoral genre” (134). In addition to being repeatedly silenced or ignored, female voices in La Galatea, even when heard, are still made to disappear as subjects. For example, “La Galatea betrays the masculinist and melancholy nature of its poetics of the lyric in the final books by setting in motion a machinery where Galatea’s desires are thwarted and she matters not as an agent with voice but as an object of poetry” (153). The fourth chapter highlights the transvestite ventriloquism of Juan de Arguijo’s Versos (1612), where the poetic trope of “prosopopeia makes Arguijo’s poetic persona identify with victimized female heroes” (191). It is in chapter five that the discussion turns to Góngora. With a focus on the development of Góngora’s characteristic “segundo estilo,” Valencia explains why, “frustration and song necessitate each other” (220). The poet’s decision to retell the myth of Polyphemus and his love of the nymph Galatea was not an arbitrary one for Valencia: “I propose that Góngora chose the Polyphemus and Galatea myth as the starting point for his ambitious project to transform Spanish poetry because it afforded him the materials to advance the melancholy and masculinist poetics of the lyric that I trace in this book” (208). Ultimately, what comes to the fore is the embodied nature of lyric expression in the early-modern period: “What melancholy’s link with poetry explained in the mind of Góngora and his contemporary readers is that voice is fundamentally embodied, and that as such the inherent sinfulness of man weighs it down” (228).While I agree with Valencia’s assertion that gender violence lies at the heart of much vaunted early-modern lyric, especially those moments of “transvestite ventriloquism” where male poets speak for suffering female figures, the author equivocates on whether they are defining a particularly misogynist strain of early-modern lyric or whether they are defining the genre and its practitioners in their entirety. The importance of melancholy to Valencia’s understanding of the link between lyric and gender violence certainly suggests the latter reading: “the man who suffers from the excess of melancholy, which allows him to excel in the use of his imagination, and therefore compose exceptional poetry, is also prone to rape or harm the very women he loves” (38). Likewise, I wonder if it makes more sense to speak of an “Age of Garcilaso” rather than an “Age of Góngora” since the latter’s influence would not peak until the seventeenth century. Garcilaso, on the other hand, is a key reference for every poet Valencia studies in his book, including Góngora. Every chapter, except for chapter five, references Garcilaso as the crucial poetic model for Ercilla, Herrera, Cervantes, and Arguijo. As Valencia states in the introduction to the book, “the age of Góngora largely consists in the various ways in which Spanish poets grappled with Garcilaso’s legacy qua lyric poet while at the same time contending with the rise of epics” (2). What is the value then of calling this period an “Age of Góngora” when the key poetic influence is Garcilaso? Likewise, the discussion of Góngora cuts off well before the highwater mark of gongorismo with its transatlantic influences. If there is an “Age of Góngora,” it must surely include Sor Juana, no? Finally, while the author’s discussion of lyric theory is masterful, the tandem discussion of epic theory seemed rather stunted in comparison. Ercilla was the only major early modern epic poet who was not first a lyric poet. Lyric-epic poets like Luís de Camões in Portugal, Pierre de Ronsard in France, and Edmund Spenser in England all included moments of epic-lyric tension in their respective epics. Was Ercilla’s response to these tensions different from his epic homologues in Portugal, France, and England? That remains to be answered. Open questions such as these will no doubt generate much discussion in the years to come, a testament to the far-reaching implications of Valencia’s argument in The Melancholy Void.Just for the wealth of lyric literary history discussed, Valencia’s monograph is a valuable reference for students of early-modern Spain. The book convincingly demonstrates the links between lyric expression, melancholic subjectivity, and gender violence in early-modern lyric poetry. Its denunciation of gender violence in early-modern poetry helps open the door to necessary but difficult discussions about the harmful legacies of arch-canonical poets and the lyric poetic tradition more generally. The study of early-modern poetry in Spain will no doubt be better off for having the reckoning with gender violence proposed by The Melancholy Void.