SOURCE: Rivers, Elias L. “Oral and Written Poetry in Góngora.” In Proceedings of the Vth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Nikola Banasevic, pp. 515-18. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1969.

In the following essay, Rivers analyzes Polifemo y Galatea and other poems, arguing that in these works Góngora exhibits a mastery of Spanish oral traditions as well as the written traditions of Greek and Italian poetry.

It is well known that in Spain the introduction of the Renaissance tradition of literary, hendecasyllabic poetry did not destroy the native tradition of oral, predominantly octosyllabic poetry. The oral traditions of lyric zéjel (stanzas with rhyming refrain) and of narrative romance (non-stanzaic sequence of lines with continuous assonance) survived both in rural society and in transcriptions, which were published in the form of single sheets and of more expensive quarto and folio collections. By the beginning of...