We wish to

1) identify, analyze, and summarize rhythmic patterns in romances by two top Spanish Golden Age poets: Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), and Lope de Vega (1562-1635);

2) stylistically analyze verse and strophic rhythm in selected texts that prove to be turning points in the artists’ rhythmic evolution;

3) use the resulting data to confirm or reject authorship of other texts, as well as to date romances;

4) propose applying this methodology to other poetic forms and authors; propose a new way of studying rhythm valid for all European literatures: looking at strophic, and not only verse rhythm.

This project will combine an empirical and a stylistic approach in order to produce new criteria to classify (by subgenre, date, and author) the poetic and dramatic corpus of Golden Age Spanish literature. It will focus originally on the romances by Góngora and Lope.

The empirical phase of the project will provide a point of departure uncommon in current literary studies: hard data and statistics, later to be processed to classify the corpus. This approach will tackle classical problems from a new angle: it will classify poems by genre, authorship (attribution), and dating, and it will do so using a poetical trait never before used for these purposes, verse and strophic rhythm.

The stylistic phase will zoom on significant examples in the corpus to analyze how poets utilized a main feature of verse (accentual rhythm and its combinations within the stanza) to produce poetic meaning. It will demonstrate how verse rhythm contributes to shape poetry, and how inextricably united sound and meaning are. In order to achieve that goal, this phase will focus on milestones in the poets’ rhythmic evolution, identified as such during the empirical phase.

This combination of an empirical and a stylistic approach will produce these results.

a) hard data on rhythmic patterns in all the romances by the two authors,
b) an analysis and classification of the data,
c) a classification of the romance corpus by
• subgenre (i.e., epic, burlesque, etc., according to the interaction between rhythm and theme),
• authorship (probable and improbable, in various degrees),
• date (by decade and, when possible, by lustrum),
d) a proposal to extend this approach to analyze other poetic forms, genres, and authors.
e) a proposal to reflect on our understanding of poetic rhythm.