The Seventeenth Century: an Age of Genius.

It is difficult to summarize the achievements of European literature in the Baroque and classical eras, because they are at one and the same time enormous and yet enormously varied. From the benefit of hindsight, though, the years following 1600 witnessed some fundamental changes that were to shape the greatest literature of the age. The examples of Italy, long the inspiration for the Renaissance's greatest literary innovations, declined in importance as a source of emulation for Europeans in the Baroque era. Although great literature continued to be produced in Italy, much of the efforts of Italian authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found an outlet in new artistic forms like the opera, where authors were kept busily employed writing libretti for the country's insatiable appetites for musical dramas. The years around 1600 were for Spain a Golden Age...