Knowra Culteranismo Culteranismo Culteranismo is a Spanish Baroque literary style marked by elaborate syntax, learned allusions, and ornate vocabulary. Luis de Góngora is its most influential practitioner.
Hyperbaton : A figure of speech that disrupts ordinary word order for emphasis, rhythm, or artistic effect. Culteranismo often uses displaced word order to make sentences intricate and ceremonious.
Luis de Góngora : A Spanish poet whose elaborate late style became the leading model for culteranismo. His poetry gave the style its most influential and technically demanding form.
Soledades : An unfinished poem by Luis de Góngora, composed in richly allusive and syntactically complex verse. It is the fullest demonstration of the style’s sustained verbal and syntactic difficulty.
Conceptismo : A Spanish Baroque style that compresses meaning through wit, wordplay, and sharp conceptual turns. It is the conventional counterpart to culteranismo, though writers could combine their techniques.
Generation of '27 : A group of Spanish poets who came to prominence around 1927 and renewed interest in Góngora. Their 1927 commemoration of Góngora helped bring his work back to the center of Spanish literary culture.
Periphrasis : A roundabout expression that names something indirectly through description or substitution. Indirect naming lets culteranista poetry replace plain terms with elaborate descriptions.
Francisco de Quevedo : A Spanish Golden Age writer known for poetry, prose, and sharp satirical wit. His attacks on Góngora helped turn stylistic disagreement into a public literary feud.
Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea : A narrative poem by Luis de Góngora retelling the classical story of Polyphemus, Galatea, and Acis. Its mythological subject and elaborate descriptions exemplify Góngora’s mature manner.
Plain style : A mode of writing that favors direct expression and relatively unornamented language. Its preference for clarity exposes the deliberate difficulty that critics objected to in culteranismo.
Spanish Golden Age : A period of flourishing Spanish literature and arts spanning roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Culteranismo developed within the literary culture of this period.
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