A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain by Mary E. Barnard (review)

Reviewed by: A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain by Mary E. Barnard Felipe Valencia Keywords Felipe Valencia, Mary E. Barnard, Early Modern Spanish Poetry, Luis De Góngora, Luisa De Carvajal Y Mendoza, Juan De Arguijo, Francisco De Quevedo, Material Lyric barnard, mary e. A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain. U of Toronto P, 2022, x + 175 pp., 24 illustrations. In A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain, Mary E. Barnard studies poems “in which objects are endowed with agency to stage interactive performances with readers and viewers for mediating cultural and historical memory” and, more generally, poems that make “reference” to “concrete objects” in the work of four Spanish authors from the early seventeenth century (14, 129). Objects in these poets serve “as vehicles for exploring issues of moment in Philip III’s Spain: the preservation of humanist learning in the age of print; the collapse of empires, specifically of imperial Rome and implicitly of Habsburg Spain; the role of learned academies in the literary and artistic life beyond the court; the formation of subjective identities within distinct social spaces; and the role of religious objects in the tradition of spirituality of Counter-Reformation Spain” (13). The investment on the part of the court of Philip III (r. 1598–1621)—particularly his valido, the Duke of Lerma—in collecting and displaying lavish works of art warrants Barnard’s focus on poetry from his reign. A Poetry of Things builds upon her previous monograph, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of [End Page 475] Renaissance Europe.1 Therefore, she selects four poets who, in her estimation, through their use of Italianate forms, their foregrounding of an imperial subject and their practices of imitation, inherited and carried into the Baroque Garcilaso’s project of “a vibrant material lyric in which objects served as sites of discourse and cultural exchange” (4). The book comprises an introduction, five chapters and a brief epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 examine poems by Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), the humanist and politician whose upbringing at court afforded him familiarity with precious works of art as privileged sites of meaning. In the first chapter, Barnard focuses on “‘conversations’ with the past through objects” in the sonnet that famously begins “Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,” the epitaph sonnets devoted to Christopher Columbus and Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna, and the silva “Al pincel” (11). Barnard shows that in these poems, Quevedo ascribes agency to objects—books, a piece of wood from Columbus’s carrack, a funerary marble slab, the paintbrush—so that they may recover and preserve the humanist learning or the memory of imperial deeds that otherwise would be ravaged by time. Throughout the chapter, Barnard relies on Michel de Certeau’s notion of the practice of place as, in her words, “the human interactions by readers, passers-by and viewers” that activate objects and invest them with meaning (40).2 The following chapter, dedicated to the silva “A Roma antigua y moderna,” argues that Quevedo follows the humanist script of reading the ruined cityscape of ancient Rome through classical texts, thereby relating the physical landscape to its cultural impress, what Carl Sauer called the morphology of landscape.3 Chapter 3 turns to the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) by Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), which is, according to Barnard, “a set of landscapes replete with objects, where even time and sonority are materialized” (12). Each of these landscapes is a “lived space that is produced by a defining performative act” (87). They are, to wit: the Count of Niebla’s estate, activated by the hunt at dawn (lines 1–24); the titular cyclops’s cave and the objects he hoards (25–94); the shoreline where desire for Galatea reigns supreme (95–136); the locus [End Page 476] amoenus where she and Acis have their midday erotic encounter (177–336); and Polyphemus’s realm as he sings his song of melancholy introspection and unleashes jealous violence at dusk (337–504). In chapter 4, Barnard ventures that two mythological sonnets by Juan de Arguijo (1567–c. 1622...

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