Baroque Literature

Baroque literature refers to the ornate, elaborate literary style that dominated Europe from the late sixteenth century through the early eighteenth century, following the Renaissance and preceding Neoclassicism. Emerging alongside the Baroque movement in art, architecture and music, it favored intricate wordplay, extended metaphor (conceit), paradox, dramatic tension and a preoccupation with mortality, illusion and religious or courtly grandeur. Major figures associated with the style include the English metaphysical poets, the Spanish poets Luis de Gongora and Francisco de Quevedo, whose rival ornate and conceptual styles gave the era's Spanish verse the names Gongorism and Conceptismo, and German poets of the Thirty Years' War period such as Andreas Gryphius. The style flourished differently across national literatures but shared a common taste for elaborate ornamentation and rhetorical excess that later Neoclassical critics reacted against as artifice.