“No es de condenar porque parezca enigmático”: Lope’s commentary on the sonnet ‘La calidad elementar resiste’

Abstract

SUMMARY: Lope’s sonnet La calidad elementar resiste and its self-commentary published in La Circe has traditionally been conceived as a pedantic rejoinder to his gongorist critics. But the importance of the sonnet for Lope, witnessed by its publication on three separate occasions, invites a re-reading of the sonnet and its commentary as more than mere posturing against the vogue of gongorism. A closer analysis of the content of Lope’s commentary points to a personal, pyscho-erotic stake veiled in the language of Neoplatonism and the underlying scholastistic conceptions of amor and eros, relying not only on the Heptaplus of Pico della Mirandola but more significantly on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Ficino’s translations of Plato.