Luis de Góngora y Argote's mythological poem Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea has received uninterrupted attention since it first circulated in manuscript at the court of Madrid in 1613. At the time, the object – along with Góngora's other long poem, Soledades – of fiery and scandalized repulsion as much as of exultant praise, Polifemo today is considered a masterwork of Spanish Baroque poetry.

Based on the Ovidian fable of the ill-fated love between the nymph Galatea and the young shepherd Acis, the poem departs from and expands upon Ovid's version, focusing on the amorous encounter that will bring about the couple's tragic demise as Acis is crushed with a boulder by the jealous cyclops Polyphemus. Formally the poem is characterized by its extreme linguistic and rhetorical complexity. It reads as a maze of convoluted metaphors that seem to spring one from the other endlessly. This maze creates a multi-leveled game of cross-referencing and compels the reader to maintain a dialogic tension with the rich constellation of Classical texts that support the poem. Reinforcing this metaphorical pregnancy, the Polifemo conspicuously bends the canonical rules of Renaissance poetic language, multiplying rhetorical figures such as alliteration, hyperbole, oxymoron and so on, while bending the syntactical rules of Spanish with violently deforming hyperbaton. Grandiose in its engaging imagery and in its linguistic experimentation, but often obscure to the point of inaccessibility, the poem has defied comprehensive interpretation. Its vast modern bibliography, dominated by studies focused on discrete thematic, stylistic and ideological themes, resembles a heavily faulted topography.