Francisco de Aldana, also known by the monicker el divino capitán for his religious poetry, has been called a forgotten poet of Spain’s Golden Age. His relative obscurity is perhaps the result of a poetic corpus that continues to frustrate attempts at definition and categorisation. This paper addresses one of the longer fragments from Aldana’s love poetry (‘Gracia particular, que el alto cielo’) with respect to the difficulties that arise from the tension between sensual and erotic elements juxtaposed against the Neo-Platonic and Petrarchan tones that are clearly present. Aldana shall be shown to focus upon physicality, reshaping common tropes to produce a hybrid text that seemingly acts as a means to pass off material perhaps considered too risqué by the reader. These aims are supported by the use of techniques that engender distance, such as linguistic play and humour, which function as a cushion between the reader and erotic content. The result is the presentation of an uncanonical and alternate vision of love by Aldana that sits in opposition to the ideals of the courtly love lyric of the era.
-
Recent Posts
- Francisco de Aldana: ¿el divino capitán? – Paul Joseph Lennon (University of Cambridge)
- ‘Dine with the Opposition? No, gracias! Hispanism versus Iberian Studies in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
- CANCELLED: Worker Rights and the NAFTA Labour Institutions – Prof. Kevin Middlebrook
- ‘Otra vez la madre España. Intelectuales hispanoamericanos ante la guerra civil española’ – Niall Bins
- ‘A Kind of Private Joke? A Study of Allusion in Borges’ Fiction’ – Evelyn Fishburn
Archives
Categories
Meta
Advertisements