Team Iberia's Spain: History, Links, and Hovercrafts Continued

The History of Poetry in Spain:

The history of poetry in Spain is much more difficult to pin down, if only because the history of Spanish-language poetry is so vast and various, and often gets confused with the history of poetry from Spain itself. However, Spain, like Portugal with “Os Lusíadas,” pivots its history of poetics around a larger national epic, the “Cantar de Mio Cid,” written in 1140 in the form of 3 major cantos through mester de juglaria, or the verse form of the minstrels dominated by assonance rather than rhyme. For a link to this “Song of My Lord” in English, click here.

Castillian narrative poetry, or mester de clerecía, replaced the minstrel verse in the 13th C. Learned poets, usually clerics (hence the name) used consonance, Alexandrine syllabic lines and quatrains to especially explore Christian themes and the lives of the saints.

By the middle ages, lyric poetry again dominated, but also again, there is a distinction between the poetry of the commoners (folk-songs or jarchas) and the poetry of the educated noble class. Such historical class distinctions in the realm of who was entitled to the language of poetry are especially interesting in light of our modern readings of poems like “The Tale of the Hedgehog” (whose simple language can’t save him from death by materialism), or lines like “Poetry is useless, it serves only / to behead a king” (from “Poetry,” p. 13).

A vacillation between a longing for both complication and simplicity in the language occurs throughout the next few movements in poetry. By the 15th-C. Renaissance in Spanish poetry, the poets of the age are interested mostly in uncomplicated diction and syntax, preferring to eschew what seems to be unnatural or overly wrought language. The poets of the Baroque period take the opposite tack, and are later accused by poets of the Enlightenment for privileging a twisted rhetorical structure. Romanticism in Spanish poetry continued to prize folk art and customs as well as to elevate subjective experience but through stylized presentation, while the Realist poets of the 19th C. again returned to simpler descriptions of everyday experience.

20th C. Spanish poetry, then, accepts these struggles of the ownership of language and how best to articulate lyric through language and poetry becomes highly politicized in light of the destruction of Spain’s fleet in Cuba by the U.S. in 1898. A restless generation of Spanish poets is born, some heavily nationalistic, such as Lorca, and these poets (into the present day) are often forced to grapple with how modern technology, economy, and machinery factors into their love of the national and natural world of Spain (again, see “The Tale of the Hedgehog” and the stanza in “Poetics” which reads “I know that other poets / disguise themselves as poets, / they go to their offices of silence / they manage their banks of brilliance, / they calculate with essence / the balance of their internal assets, / they are the torchbearers of the kings and gods / or they are the tongue of hell” (14). An interesting link between these issues of consumerism, Tuscaloosa, and Lorca, it seems that the room where Lorca was taken from before he was shot in ‘36 has been converted into a restaurant called El Rincon (de Lorca). For a tour of Lorca’s Spain, click here. And for another fun link of Lorca, where someone has artificially animated a still photoraph of Federico to read one of his poems, watch this YouTube video.

Further Useful Links, including Poets from our Anthology:

1. Bernardo Atxaga's very flashy website

2. Chus Pato's page at Shearsman Books

And, to tie our countries’ sections together…

…a video of another Galician poet, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, speaking at a rally. (The poem doesn't start until the end of the 2nd minute, and then its cut off, but a fine opportunity to listen to the interesting combination of Portuguese and Spanish that is Galician)

as well as the same useful phrases, this time in Spanish:

How are you? ¿Cómo estás?

I love you. Te amo

My hovercraft is full of eels. Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas.