SOURCE: McCaw, R. John. “Turning a Blind Eye: Sexual Competition, Self-Contradiction, and the Importance of Pastoral in Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea.” Hispanofila 127 (September 1999): 27-35.

In the following essay, McCaw examines pastoral and sexual themes in Polifemo y Galatea.

In twentieth-century criticism on Luis de Góngora's poetry, the place of the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in the tradition of pastoral literature has been investigated and established.¹ Like many who associate Góngora's poem with pastoral, C. Colin Smith has called attention to the pastoral significance of particular topics that characterize the Fábula's poetic landscape:

Here Góngora coincides with all those who had written on the Beatus ille theme, but in the Polifemo and particularly in the Soledades he treats the theme far more profoundly than most of his predecessors, courtly people out from town for a week-end romp, or...