Shakespeare, Donne, Quevedo, and Göngora.

Poets write great; great poets write anew. This is very difficult to do, as it requires a great amount of courage and self-confidence. In the case of Donne (in The Faerie Queene, with the ʻEdmund Spenserʼ pseudonym), he used the strategy of writing in an old, archaic form of English, following the archaic English of his model and master, the Catholic Geoffrey Chaucer. Many contemporaries did not like that option (like Philip Sidney), but Donne loved it, as it gave his heroic poetry the flavour and sound of the sacred past, a ʻwell of English undefiledʼ. With the ʻThomas Nasheʼ mask Donne went completely off the charts in terms of creativity, and reading his Menippean tracts can be exhilarating: you feel the freedom of the English language on steroids. Shakespeare increased the English language with new words of his own and many others from many other languages like Spanish, French, or Italian, giving it a great flexibility and creativity, while Joyce in Finnegans Wake took the English language to the next, logical level, the one in which the English language is so mixed with other ones that the result is no longer English, but a different language: the Wakese.

 Göngora followed a different strategy. Instead of going to archaic Spanish or creating tons of new words (adopted and newly created), which he did sparingly with Italian mainly, he went to the European fountain of it all: the Latin language. He adopted latin words in his poetry for new meanings, or used Spanish words in their latin etymological sense, creating a new sense of Spanish, indeed, a Spanish which sounds as majestic as Latin. He was not Quevedo, who resembles Donne and Shakespeare and Joyce, inventing tons of new words (adopted or newly created), but nevertheless changed the Spanish language as it has never been so changed before. How to explain this fact? Why the inventions of Quevedo did not have such an impact as Göngoraʼs? I do not know. I can only account for this by saying that Göngora had more taste and chose better. His Latinising the Spanish language was not liked by many, but his influence was felt on everyone, nevertheless. He was ʻthe Spanish Homerʼ, as Pellicer called him. Why Homer and not Ovid, if Göngora strived all his life to create the Joco-serious style, the Lyrical-burlesque style? I think that he was called ʻthe Spanish Homerʼ because of his energeia. His intensity, his energy, his powerful creativity so condensed and so well chosen. Göngora is not a rush of words, but a brilliant harmony of words. It is about the sonority, the musicality of the language, not the bravura or dexterity you show off with it. It is not just creativity, but sensitivity. Invention coupled with musicality. You cannot write the rules of his poetry, as it depends on his exquisite taste, as it happens with Mozart, but you can learn from it by following his example. We can change the thought we started with, then. Poets write great; great poets sing. If you add to that an immense wit, then in Göngora you have a supreme model in which to learn how to be a poet. In Spanish there is nothing beyond him, because perfection is imperfectible.