SOURCE: Gaylord, Mary Malcolm. “Góngora and the Footprints of the Voice.” In Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, pp. 79-106. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Gaylord examines Góngora's “Sonnet 80” (“Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino”) as a basis for discussion of the poet's reputed lack of personal voice in the Soledades.

Few readers of the Soledades fail to note Góngora's linking, in the poem's striking first lines, of his pilgrim's physical footsteps with the movement of verse itself:

Pasos de un peregrino son errante cuantos me dictó versos dulce Musa en soledad confusa, perdidos unos, otros inspirados. 

[Such verses as my muse may grant / are steps upon a wandering pilgrim's way; / while some may go astray, / in lonely mazes, others live inspired.]

(Cunningham, p. 3)

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