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“No se puede reducir a continuado término”: Cervantes and the Poetic Persona

Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) constitutes a remarkable showcase and laboratory of the various meters and genres used in Spanish poetry during the crucial decade of 1580, as well as the debates and problems surrounding this art form. This article focuses on La Galatea’s treatment of the “persona,” the fictiveness of the speaker, and the possibility of sincerity in poetry. By analyzing two episodes (a conversation in book two regarding the sincerity of the famous shepherd Tirsi, and the contest in book three that results in Orfenio’s victory) it will be shown how the emergent Italian theory of the lyric during the second half of the sixteenth century coincides with the poetics presented in La Galatea. At the end, a brief reading of Góngora’s romance “Hanme dicho, hermanas” (1587) will show Cervantes’s attunement to the new poetry that would transform Spanish literature at the turn of the seventeenth century.