The 17th-century love lyric: witty love poetry

Author(s)

Marcelo Lachat

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-02-27

Examining board members

Adma Fadul Muhana; Maria do Socorro Fernandes de Carvalho; Joao Adolfo Hansen; Isaac Newton Almeida Ramos; Flávio Antônio Fernandes Reis

• Advisor: Adma Fadul Muhana

Abstract

The present work articulates the specificities of 17th-century poetry produced in Portugal and in Colonial Brazil as it proposes the notion of witty love to characterize its diverse love lyric poems. Pursuing this perspective, the reading of these poems follows the path of imitation, a fundamental term to understand the rhetorico-poetic production of the 16th and 17th centuries. The lyric poems from which the analyses depart, that is, both those penned (despite a questionable attribution of authorship in many cases) by well-known 17th-century poets such as Antônio Barbosa Bacelar, D. Francisco Manuel de Melo, Frei Antônio das Chagas, Gregório de Matos, Jerônimo Baía, Manuel Botelho de Oliveira, and Violante do Céu, and those deemed anonymous or with a less constituted poetic authorship, such as Bernardo Vieira Ravasco and Manuel de Faria e Sousa, all these poems, as imitations, demanded that the learned readers or listeners of the time recognize their poetic models; for this reason, this study often draws from Camões and Góngora, for instance. In any event, in the 17th century imitating the auctoritates to forge auctoritas did not only mean to copy obsequiously; 17th-century poets emulated their models, crafting ingenious and witty compositions that were more suitable to the decorum in vogue. Thus wit is a central notion in 17th-century rhetorico-poetic precepts, and it will also be so in this study. As I will demonstrate, from this wit poetry ensues the crafting of an equally witty love, that is, a love that is not the subjective and original expression of any individual, but one which is present in poems whose unexpected effects are rhetorically and poetically forged. The fruit of imitations, witty love is Ovidian, courtly, Petrarchan, Camonian, Marinist, Gongorian; miscellanea of doctrines, it is Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Christian; by defining it in this dissertation, I intend to gather the poetic variety of 17th-century love lyric, like an acute stem that supports learned flowers (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 09/08018-0 - The seventeenth-century love lyric: poetry of witty love
• Grantee: Marcelo Lachat
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate