"Impresas ansias": poéticas de la escritura en Villamediana, Sor Juana y Melo

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the depictions of writing that appear in the poetry of Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana (1582-1622), Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695). The questions it seeks to answer are the following: Why are images allusive to writing frequently incorporated in texts belonging to specific verse modalities such as love, panegyric, epistolary and philosophical poetry? What are the thematic and social implications of a series of self-referential gestures included in verses that feature an enunciating subject who expresses individual emotion? How do these scriptural images relate to issues concerning poetic vocation and the distribution of literary material? In order to assess the fundamental importance of this motif, I investigate Melo's volume of self-edited poetry Obras Métricas, Villamediana's sonnets and his Fábula de Faetón, as well as Sor Juana's romances, the Enigmas, and the Epinicio gratulatorio. The results of my enquiry show that to write about writing in poetry foregrounds issues concerning creative autonomy, social relationships between writers, adherence to and self-perpetuation in an established literary canon in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula, and the preservation of art. Despite having been produced in different times and locations, Villamediana's, Melo's and Sor Juana's works are indebted to Luis de Góngora y Argote's groundbreaking explorations of poetic language and display a constant meditation whose linguistic and thematic features define the burgeoning genre of lyric poetry.