SOURCE: Beverley, John R. “Introduction” and “Góngora's ‘Carta en respuesta.’” In Aspects of Góngora's Soledades, pp. 1-8, 11-25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1980.

In the first excerpt below, Beverley argues that the Soledades was written in response to Hapsburg absolutism, Spanish decadence, and impending imperial decline. In the second excerpt, he examines the language in the Soledades, which, he notes, is so complicated that it was often condemned in its own day as incomprehensible.

Introduction

It was no accident that Dámaso Alonso found it necessary to incorporate in his work on Góngora's poetic language some of the concepts of Saussure's structural linguistics. The nature of any linguistic sign, Saussure had suggested, proposed a relation between two relata: signifier and signified, speaker and hearer, intention and understanding, language rule and language use, convention and invention. The attack on the Soledades in the early seventeenth century...