Complete the account of the Golden Age quarrel.
Góngora practised ______, with Latinate vocabulary and displaced word order, difficulty of ______. Quevedo practised ______, folding meanings into each other, difficulty of ______.
Word bank: culteranismo · surface · conceptismo · thought · costumbrismo · rhyme
Hints
- One poet makes the sentence hard to parse; the other makes the idea hard to unfold.
- Culteranismo works on the surface of the language, conceptismo on the concept.
Show the answer
Góngora practised culteranismo, with Latinate vocabulary and displaced word order, difficulty of surface. Quevedo practised conceptismo, folding meanings into each other, difficulty of thought.
The distinction survives because it names two real options in any difficult poetry: a surface that resists reading, or a thought that resists paraphrase. The two poets loathed each other, and each had correctly identified something the sonnet could be made to do.
Practise Poetic Traditions II: the Sonnet and the Golden Age
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