Luis de Góngora

Culteranismo is the highly elaborate Baroque style associated with Góngora, full of Latinized syntax, mythological references, and dense metaphor. His Soledades made that style famous and controversial in 17th-century Spain.

Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo represented sharply different poetic styles in Spain's Golden Age. Their feud included satirical poems and personal attacks, with Góngora linked to culteranismo and Quevedo to conceptismo.

The Soledades follow a shipwrecked young man through pastoral and rural scenes, but the plot is less important than the poem's ornate language. Góngora began the work in the early 1600s and left the larger planned project unfinished.

Spanish poets of the Generation of 1927 admired Góngora's verbal daring and marked the 300th anniversary of his death in 1927. Writers such as Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti helped restore his reputation as a major experimental poet.