The great effort to elevate lyric poetry to complex forms of art, which had exhausted itself in empty sonorities and in aristocratic intellectual combinations, was made by Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega. The Italian hendecasyllable, both loose and linked in various metric and strophic combinations, enters resolutely with Boscán in Spanish literature. Garcilaso ensures its triumph. In the forms of the sonnet, song and love eclogue, with a happy adaptation of Horatian lyrical attitudes (La flor de Gnido), Garcilaso makes of the Italian verse the lucid and fitting expression of a fervent, melancholy and nostalgic soul, in an anxiety for things loved and lost. Il Boscán, translating (1534) with elegant fidelity the Cortegiano del Castiglione, discovered to his compatriots the ideal of the Italian aristocratic life and gave them, together with the theories of Platonic love and ideal beauty, the feeling of a superior humanity, which in its wisdom and composure was inspired by the ancients. According to nexticle.net, the Italian hendecasyllable, which enclosed in itself the light of a thought and an art used to the graces of formal expression, made it easy to pass concepts from one language to another and was the most effective vehicle of substantial Italianism in Spain. The traditional motifs of the amorous lyric were thus renewed and elaborated with a more careful sense of order and proportion, of measure and harmony. Gutierre de Cetina, Hernando de Acuña, Francisco de Figueroa, poets of aristocratic and dreamy spirits, they relived their classic memories in the new metric, which seemed to acquire greater clarity and grace. Someone swayed between the old and the new. Diego de Mendoza abandoned the easy harmony of the “short verse” in the satirical epistles, where the thoughts and feelings of Horace and Tibullus shine forth. Others, on the other hand, such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, Antonio de Villegas and also, in part, Gregorio Silvestre, clung to the forbidden rhythmic modules and the beautiful names of the past, either out of polemical intent or lack of preparation. Outside of the lyric, a greater aristocratic refinement in the conception of art and life, and a more pungent sense of the current demands of contemporary reality, made people abandon the books of chivalry, which had risen with the Someone swayed between the old and the new. Diego de Mendoza abandoned the easy harmony of the “short verse” in the satirical epistles, where the thoughts and feelings of Horace and Tibullus shine forth.
Others, on the other hand, such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, Antonio de Villegas and also, in part, Gregorio Silvestre, clung to the forbidden rhythmic modules and the beautiful names of the past, either out of polemical intent or lack of preparation. Outside of the lyric, a greater aristocratic refinement in the conception of art and life, and a more pungent sense of the current demands of contemporary reality, made people abandon the books of chivalry, which had risen with the Someone swayed between the old and the new. Diego de Mendoza abandoned the easy harmony of the “short verse” in the satirical epistles, where the thoughts and feelings of Horace and Tibullus shine forth. Others, on the other hand, such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, Antonio de Villegas and also, in part, Gregorio Silvestre, clung to the forbidden rhythmic modules and the beautiful names of the past, either out of polemical intent or lack of preparation. Outside of the lyric, a greater aristocratic refinement in the conception of art and life, and a more pungent sense of the current demands of contemporary reality, made people abandon the books of chivalry, which had risen with the Others, on the other hand, such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, Antonio de Villegas and also, in part, Gregorio Silvestre, clung to the forbidden rhythmic modules and the beautiful names of the past, either out of polemical intent or lack of preparation. Outside of the lyric, a greater aristocratic refinement in the conception of art and life, and a more pungent sense of the current demands of contemporary reality, made people abandon the books of chivalry, which had risen with the Others, on the other hand, such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, Antonio de Villegas and also, in part, Gregorio Silvestre, clung to the forbidden rhythmic modules and the beautiful names of the past, either out of polemical intent or lack of preparation.
Outside of the lyric, a greater aristocratic refinement in the conception of art and life, and a more pungent sense of the current demands of contemporary reality, made people abandon the books of chivalry, which had risen with the Amadís de Gaula and left to professional storytellers. These pursued the exploits of the fantastic descendants of Amadigi, created new cycles (Palmerín de Oliva, 1511; Primaleón); episodically they deepened the fundamental motif of heroic love or exhausted it, with Feliciano de Silva, in verbal acuteness and conceptuality. In the Palmerín de Inglaterra (1547-48) the melancholy and dreamy note of love also entered and a more vivid sense of ideal beauty and historical and geographical reality appeared, amidst the confusion of the imagination. But on the whole the chivalry books appealed only to the common people and were a pleasant reading of them. They never found a good reception from the major humanists. Juan Luis Vives, Juan de Valdés, Arias Montano opposed them in the name of true art, which is essentially delightful beauty. The idea of a Spain which in the moment of its most intense political life is only intent on writing dreamy books of chivalry goes back to the French Enlightenment and to the one-sided, negative and sectarian vision that the men of the Encyclopedia had of Spanish literature. In truth, the books of chivalry with their abstract individualism were felt as a dream art, outside the vital currents of thought and released from that reality where the individual exercises his initiative, assimilating and reworking the human values that are offered to him by the world. of culture and history. It was then that through the work of an unknown author the abstract empirical ideal of a hungry poor was opposed to the abstract ideal of chivalry. The abstract empirical ideal of a hungry poor man. The abstract empirical ideal of a hungry poor man. The Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) is not a social satire. Such may seem to philological or historicist criticism, which makes poetry a document of history and aims more than at the individuality of the work at the generic characters of the later picaresque novel. In the Lazarillo we have the individualistically subjective and one-sided vision of the world, when it is contemplated through hunger and the natural and instinctive needs of the protagonist. He relies on chance, like any knight-errant, and passes from one master to another, as hungry as he is and no less than him. The novel’s formal or expressive realism is contained within the limits of a verbal composure, in which the author’s spirit shines through. He reveals a dark world of unconscious selfishness; but he feels them as belonging to human nature and smiles at them, still recognizing them beyond good and evil.
