Vol. 16 (2013)
Artículos

River Lethe and Love in Spanish poetry

Abstract

This paper studies the theme of love beyond oblivion in the Spanish and Italian literature from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The first approach occurs in a idyll attributed to Theocritus that was published in the late fifteenth century and translated into Latin and Castilian in the following centuries. Surely under its influence, Sannazzaro (and perhaps earlier Joan Rois de Corella) cultivated the subject at the end of his Arcadia and, after him, the vast majority of Italian poets of the Renaissance and Baroque, whom Spanish poets imitated. Subsequently, the subject kept trying but since most original and enigmatic mode (Machado and Salinas).