‘Un verdadero poeta’: Rereading Soto de Rojas in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

The critical fortunes of Pedro Soto de Rojas have always been bound up with those of Luis de Góngora. But Soto was never merely a gongorista; in his pivotal 1927 Antología poética en honor de Góngora, Gerardo Diego differentiated Soto from the mediocre followers of Góngora: ‘Por fin, en el licenciado don Pedro Soto de Rojas encontramos un verdadero poeta.’ While denoting Soto ‘un gongorino ejemplar’, Elsa Dehennin would later assert the singularity of his poetic voice: ‘mas allá del metro de la Silva y del código cultista hay una personalidad creadora – el yo del poeta – muy distinta a la de Góngora’. The Baroque exploration of desire, Desengaño de amor en rimas (1623), dedicated to a single beloved, Fenix, captures a transitional moment in the Granadan poet’s trajectory. Within this collection it is possible to detect the impact of the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1611) and the Soledades (1613), most apparent in Soto’s Fábula de la Naya. The present chapter examines meta-artistic tropes which emerge within the poet’s pastoral verse, a corpus recently enriched by the attribution of a ‘new’ mythological fable to Soto (Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa).

Aurora Egido noted that in the context of Renaissance Spain, contemporary theoretical writings on the eclogue are scant and somewhat belated, despite an abundance of pastoral composition. In the absence of an abundance of theoretical writings on pastoral poetry I will highlight in particular the moments wherein pastoral’s inherent preoccupation with artistry becomes most apparent. Within the pastoral poetry of the Desengaño and his experimental, fragmentary fables, the dark eroticism evident in Soto’s Los Fragmentos de Adonis (1619) begins to emerge. Attention to the poet’s engagement with Ovid allows us to chart a trajectory from the eclogues of the Desengaño through to the fleeting sensual encounters of the Aretusa.

Lope de Vega’s prologue to Soto’s 1623 collection gives us a glimpse of the literary milieu these seventeenth-century poets inhabited:

In 1634 Lope may have playfully alluded in verse to the Gongorist leanings of el ardiente.