Benito Jerónimo Feijoo's Metrical Usages

Abstract

This study draws, for the first time, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo's little known poetic corpus. Among the 119 poems that form this corpus, we propose studying the 109 that have a more probable authorship, among which we may find  27 romances, 25 villancicos, 19 poems in décimas, 15 poems in redondillas, 6 poems in quintillas, 5 sonnets, 4 polistrophic poems, 3 endechas reales, a poem in cuartetas, a poem in sextetos-lira, a poem in coplas, a octava real and a sextilla. We analyze how Feijoo uses each poetic form, paying special attention to those examples that have important hermeneutical consequences. We conclude that Feijoo's metrics do not diverge from the norms of the time, but that the weight he gives to forms closer to prosaísmo and also present in some poets of the time, such as Spanish meters and octosyllabic verse, reveal an evolution from Baroque poetic language to the ideals of natural language that begin to appear in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.