This collection of essays claims that its purpose is “a modest one” (vi), but it is anything but modest. It is addressed to “new readers,” specifically “anglophone students of Góngora” (vi), but the not-so-new reader confronts a bibliography of more than 800 entries that includes only one for the journal Caliope — a main venue of Gongorian scholarship in the US — while including twenty-nine entries for Antonio Carreira and another twenty-nine for Dámaso Alonso, the epitome of classical Spanish philology, allergic to critical theory. This not-so-new reader finds the claim to modesty more than a little condescending. This neo-philological book is contemptuous about the “disdain in the last century” (vi) that theory had for them, and adopts a position of newly claimed superiority: “to assist readers to read for themselves” (vi). Góngora’s poetry, then, is read as a matter of the thetic, rather than the semiotic; of thesis rather than poesis. The editors of the book are after meaning: the correct meaning. Close reading becomes closed reading all too often; “Góngora meant” obliterates “the poem says.”

In this vein, chapter 6 addresses Góngora’s moral position; chapter 7 uses music to find theology in Góngora; chapter 8 keeps repeating the word “argument.” The unmentioned alibi of post-theory results in this attitude toward poetry, which forgets that poetry is not theology or the search for an argument, or even that the morality of a poem has more to do with its discursive emplacement in the midst of logos (as when Plato is obliged to expel poets from his republic) than with specific statements. This theory-bypassing attitude even forgets that poetry is not literature, and that Góngora, the most literary of poets, undermines literature itself with his poetry. It is not a surprise, then, that this book quotes an inordinate amount of Spanish philologists but only a handful of American critics, or that the book opens with a neopositivistic statement about “who hides” beneath a particular expression. Ignoring the mode of use of poetry, in which deictics (“I,” “you”) lose their referential work, a real-life person is hidden in the poem, just like a theological statement or a moral message is discovered in other chapters, making this reader think that if one is to read Góngora as a journalist or a theologian or a moralist, there are better ones; that, if Góngora’s interest to the new anglophone reader resides in determining who is the real person hidden underneath the poem, then Góngora is not of much interest for such a reader, and certainly not — as the title of the book proclaims — “a poet for all seasons,” because he would not be a poet, but, instead, a mediocre theologian or a celebrity fighting celebrities of his time. Chapter 3 concentrates on patriotism (if only it would extrapolate some conclusions on the tension between patriotism and poetry). Chapter 4 is a good reading of Góngora’s Polifemo, but it repeats (and discards) what dozens of articles in the US have said about the poem in the last decades.

Fortunately, some of the essays collected in the book (they are called “commentaries,” as if the book were a return to some lost paradise free of theory or other nuisances) manage to escape the straightjacket imposed on the reader as “informed guidance” (vi). Chapter 2 intelligently questions the role of autobiography “as a commentator’s chief task” (45). It reads Góngora through the lenses of Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (Adorno and Benjamin are just about the only classics of theory listed on the 800-plus list). Benjamin’s distinction between Kommentar and Kritik is the basis for another good chapter, centered around “Góngora’s mysterious silence” (135).

All things considered, this book offers a ton of data on Góngora, his times, and the (nonpoetic) meaning of his verses, taking into consideration multiple archival venues. It is a good book for an expert on Góngora who likes philological information and rigor (mortis), but not so useful for “new anglophone readers.” To them I recommend reading Góngora without that philological noise: then, and only then, will they experience, use, even delightfully abuse the poet.