The public-private paradox of acrostics in Golden Age literary studies

In Golden Age Spain, acrostic poems were paradoxically used to both openly declare devotion to a person and to cover up someone’s identity, whether a loved one or the poem’s own author. This article will explain how this paradox operates at the time of the poems’ writing, but also in modern criticism where attempts to reveal the “secret” of an acrostic only lead to further mysteries. The article will also reveal recently detected acrostics that (to the author’s knowledge) have yet to be identified in press, despite being published and hidden in plain view for decades, sometimes centuries.