'New' poetry of the Spanish golden age

What lyric poetry is and why it matters are questions that acquire a distinct complexion in different socio-historical contexts. This chapter casts a critical eye over lyric’s ‘new’ cartography in Imperial Spain, exploring ‘path-following’ as a master metaphor that accommodates the socio-political imperatives, theoretical underpinnings and evolving poetic practise of the period. The chapter has two over-arching objectives: to apprehend the individuating paths of Renaissance ‘new’ Italianate lyric in their relationship to a shared, collective, imaginary and to broader cultural practices; to attend to lyric’s foregrounding of language in all its material dimensions (thereby interrogating the “unique temporality” which Culler identified in lyric’s ‘special’ texturing). Analysis of the diverse lyric ‘events’ of language that were produced in the belated context of Spanish Renaissance humanism, will demonstrate how their transformative, self-making, properties, so effectively articulated the trauma of individual being, while also speaking to the anxieties of communal histories.