Góngora y Argote, Luis de (1561–1627)

Spanish poet. His early works, ballads and satires, were long considered his best and his sonnets remain among the finest in the language. His longer poems, however, caused a great furore. La fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) and Las Soledades/The Solitudes (1613) are written in a tortuously complex style, which offends all the rules of normal Spanish syntax. Only since the poems' reassessment by Damaso Alonso has their true value been recognized: too advanced for their age, they recall the imagistic complexity of some major 20th-century poets.