Anacreontic

Anacreonte.

The something is a lyrical composition in minor art verse that sings of the pleasures of life, wine and love. Its creator was the Greek poet Anacreon (VI century BC), for which it receives this name.

This conceptualization responds, in a general sense, to what has been accepted as anacreontic, although the themes it deals with are universal and can be found in many other types of lyric poetry, which makes that the subgenre intercommunicates with themes such as bucolismo, the symposium, love that are located in other types of poetry and with the most varied poetic and metric forms. It exists, then, in Spanish and in other languages, anacreónticas written in verse of high art and also in strophic forms such as the seguidilla or the sonnet. The use of the heptasyllable abounds, with assonance rhyme in the even verses as in the romance.

In Spanish literature the genre was acclimatized by Esteban Manuel de Villegas in the XVII century, imitating the metric of the Adonic sapphics with a stanza combination of free rhyme in three hendecasyllabic verses and one pentasyllable. We can see an example in the poem «De la lira».

But when the anacreontic genre really came into fashion it was in the second half of the XVIII century, with compositions that Numerous neoclassical poets wrote in this genre, such as Juan Meléndez Valdés, José Iglesias de la Casa and José Cadalso. An example of an anacreontic poem that recreates the characteristic themes and metrics of this genre can be seen in the poem "A Venus" by José Cadalso.

In Catalan literature we talk about Francesc Tegell who has been extensively studied by Kenneth Brown (Poema anafòric, Barcelona 1982, p. 32) and Joaquín María Bover (Library of Balearic Writers, II, Palma 1868, p. 441). An example of the same Tegell is «Poema anafòric».

Within Latin American literature we also find authors who stood out for the cultivation of this poetry that came from the Iberian Peninsula. In Mexico and Cuba there were important sources of translation and imitation since the 18th century. The anacreontic poems were also used as exercises in the island's Jesuit schools and appear in the first periodicals in America. Some authors who stand out within the Latin American anacreontic panorama are Manuel de Zequeira, Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, José Martí, Enrique José Varona, Laura Mestre Hevia and at the end of the century XX the Cuban poet Fina García Marruz.

Since the very appearance of the poems in the manuscript found by Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne) and the first edition of 1554, a debate arose over the authorship and aesthetic value of these compositions. In these diatribes, many times the prejudices of a false morality of the time prevailed more than strictly literary values. Anacreon's authorship was first disputed until in the 19th century the poems were shown to be later, dating from the period late Hellenistic and Byzantine. With the devaluation of the concepts of imitatio and retractatio and with the rise of romantic concepts and positions such as originality, this poetry fell into disuse. But it continued to attract the attention of specialists, philologists, humanists and creators.

In Spanish, some of the main specialists who have dedicated themselves to the study of ancient, Byzantine and later anacreontism in modern literatures are Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Julián Garzón Díaz, Fernández Galiano, Elina Miranda Cancela, Yoandy Cabrera, among many other voices that have dedicated themselves in recent decades to reinterpreting and valuing this vast and ancient European poetic production.

What allowed this poetry to survive through centuries of human and artistic development, and to adapt to the most varied styles and times, was its ability to assimilate themes and, at the same time, the ancient arsenal that gave it prestige and authority. It is, within the history of universal literature, an example of the game that is the literary text, of masking and polyphony, as well as of the constant rereading that is each new work that starts from a tradition and at the same time transgresses it.