Aspectos de la temporalidad en la poesía de Quevedo by Francesco Tarelli (Arkansas State University).
Temporality represents the "protagonist of the drama of the Baroque"—as Emilio Orozco Diaz points out—and in Spanish Golden Age literature, the most eloquent poetic voice of such a drama is that of Francisco de Quevedo. This monograph analyzes temporal imagery and metaphors in selected poems by Quevedo, employing an hermeneutic approach that encompasses a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, theology, iconology, emblem literature, music, and painting.
The first chapter presents a survey of the philosophical development of the concept of time from the Presocratics to Francisco Suarez (1580-1617), which is followed by an outline of the fundamental characteristics of the Baroque Age concerning time.
The second chapter situates the figure of Quevedo within the context of both the historical decadence of Spain and the writer's intellectual background, with a central focus on poetry. The first poems comprise three silvas on timepieces—namely the hourglass, the sundial, and a mechanical clock with chimes—that express the conflict between objective time and its inner perception; a quintilla and a sonnet on the ashes of dead lovers contained in an horologium pulvereum, and a burlesque sonnet on the clock and the lamp together, a pictorial poem using chiaroscuro effects. Except for an idilio on the carpe diem, and another romance on time itself, which the poet mocks, the following poems belong to the satiric-burlesque group according to Blecua's classification. They include a long poem (192 lines) on the mudanzas, that is, the changes produced by time and the steps executed during the performance of aristocratic and popular dances, which is analyzed in its entirety for the first time; a romance dedicated to the towers of Joray and its powerful message on the havoc of time, and finally, a sonnet describing the miseries of human life from birth to death.
The final chapter examines three metaphysical poems, a moral sonnet, and a Salmo from the Herdclito cristiano, and focuses on Quevedo's anguished expression of the temps vecu. The author presents a novel interpretation of the famous sonnet beginning with the line "¡Ah de !a vida!... ¿Nadie me responde?" in the light of the Thomistic metaphysical distinction between things and being.
This book is written in Spanish.
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ISBN: 978-1-58871-204-2 (PB, 271 pp.) $35