Gongora

Gongora. LUIS DE GÓNGORA Y ARGOTE, Spanish lyric poet, was born at Cordova, 11th July 1561. After a course of study in law at the university of Salamanca, he settled down in his native city to cultivate the poetic talents of which he had already shown conspicuous proofs as a student. About 1614 he entered the church, and became a prebendary of the cathedral at Cordova, and eventually chaplain to Philip III. He died in his native city, 23d May 1627. Gongora's earlier writings—sonnets on a great variety of subjects, lyrical poems, odes, ballads, and songs for the guitar—are inspired with much true poetic feeling. His later works, consisting for the most part of longer poems, such as Solidades (or Solitary Musings), Polifemo, Pyramo y Thisbe, are executed in an entirely different and novel style, characterised, especially in respect of diction, by some of the same distinctive features as are found in Enthusiasm in England and Chiasmatis in Italy. This later style of Gongora, which his followers and imitators designated the stilo culto, is florid, pedantic, full of Latin inversions and mythological allusions, pompous, and mannered, and in many places very obscure. His works were never published during his lifetime. The first edition was printed by Vicuña in 1627, good but incomplete; another good one is that of Brussels (1659). See Churton's Gongora (2 vols. Lond. 1862).