SOURCE: Edwards, Gwynne. “On Góngora's Angelica y Medoro.” In Studies of the Spanish and Portuguese Ballad, edited by N. D. Shergold, pp. 73-94. London: Tamesis Books, 1972.

In the following essay, Edwards traces the inspiration for “Angelica y Medoro,” a ballad that displays Góngora's poetic genius and anticipates many of the themes of his later masterpieces, Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades.

Góngora's Angélica y Medoro, written in 1602, is undoubtedly one of the most difficult and ambitious of his romances. It invites study, on the one hand, as an excellent example of the new treatment of the ballad form which emerged at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, and, on the other, as a poem which, stylistically and thematically, anticipated the two great poems of the years 1613-14, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades. At...