SOURCE: McCaw, R. John. “Introduction: The Soledades in Cultural Context.” In The Transforming Text: A Study of Luis de Góngora's Soledades, pp. 4-12. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 2000.

In the following essay, McCaw seeks to explain why the Soledades has been the object of so much confusion and criticism, and goes on to argue that the poem is about life and death in the natural world.

In his Soledades Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) makes use of complicated structural devices, subtle imagery, and witty techniques of allusion in order to reveal the transient character of the reality of this world, and to depict the favorable consequences of a human's proper moral conduct in the face of this reality. The deliberate intricacy with which Góngora renders humanity and nature in the Soledades demands a method—a commentary-style explication de texte—that may seem unsophisticated and outdated when measured...