La Poesia De Juan Bautista Aguirre. (Spanish Text)

275 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.This study deals with one of the most important poets of the Spanish American colonial times. His works, unpublished until 1943, have long been forgotten by the critics, and deserve a closer look. We studied the most representative of his poems, and related them to the literary tradition of Europe and Latin America. We observed and pointed out the differences between the predominant artistic movement of the time--baroque--in the Colony and in Spain. The most outstanding difference lies in the deep structure of most works by Latin American writers: a close reading of the text allows us to perceive the function that art in general played during those years. Almost every artistic work has a didactic message, based on the teachings of the Catholic Church. The poet and the preacher is, in most cases, the same person.We divided the works of Aguirre into three main categories: religious, mythological and miscellaneous poetry. In the last section, we included moral, amatorial and satirical poems. The poems were studied individually, analyzing, in every instance, the literary tradition to which they belong, from classical sources to Sor Juana, trying to point out the way in which Aguirre is original in his use of the topoi. Every poem was also analyzed stylistically and structurally; emphasis was given to the way in which the text conveys its meaning, or how the poem "means".After the study, we could observe the careful construction of the poems, and the successful way through which they give the reader a moral and religious teaching. The stylistic study allows us to comprehend the aesthetic beauty of the images employed. The sum of these two approaches leads us to our conclusion: Aguirre is one of the main Spanish American colonial poets. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Juan del Valle Caviedes and Juan Bautista Aguirre together form the trilogy of the most distinguished poets in Latin American Barroco.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD