Spanish · 1561–1627
Góngora was a Córdoban cleric who held a prebend at the cathedral, gambled, wrote ballads that people sang in the street, and then, around 1613, produced two long poems in a Latinate syntax so extreme that half of literary Spain declared him incomprehensible and the other half spent a century writing commentaries. He inverted word order, buried the verb, and built metaphors on metaphors — culteranismo, his enemies called it, and Quevedo attacked him with the cruelty reserved for a rival of equal size. He died poor in Córdoba, his memory failing. Two hundred and eighty years later a group of young Spanish poets held a public celebration of the tercentenary of his death, took his name for their movement, and became the Generation of '27: Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda, Salinas, Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, whose edition finally made the Solitudes readable.