What was involved in the seventeenth-century debates on Gongorism and in its reception by the literary elite of the Spanish imperial state and ideological apparatus was not simply a matter of style. The much argued question of Góngora's formalism meant not the absence of political and social concerns —as the contemporary usage of the term suggests— but rather the relationship between a certain way of doing poetry and the dominant ideology and society which represented and reproduced itself in and through that ideology. Poetry was still regarded as a legislative discourse; aesthetic questions were thus inseparable from ethical ones, and these in turn from the concrete institutions and operations of the state and civil society at large. In these terms, it is appropriate to consider Gongorism in its specificity as what Althusser has called an ideological practice.

Gongorism has in the seventeenth century a Janus-like nature. On the one hand, it is violently attacked by the humanists of the Counter Reformation as a form of radical heresy. For Cascales, Góngora is ‘Mahoma de la poesía española’; Quevedo boasts ‘Yo te untaré mis versos con tocino | porque no me los muerdas, Gongorilla’ (Blecua, no. 829); and for several years the Inquisition prohibits the sale of the first published edition of Góngora's poems, Lope de Vicuña's Obras en verso del Homero español of 1627. On the other, after the poet's death Gongorism rapidly becomes an accepted, even official, poetic manner in the Spanish Court and the Colonies. In the justas poéticas of the viceroyalties, no one aspiring to patronage and protection via a well wrought sonnet or ode can afford to remain innocent of Gongorist culteranismo. It serves Calderón in his effort to fashion a didactic state theater and also Gracián's neo-scholastic aesthetics and politics. The Conde Duque de Olivares has Góngora's works transcribed on parchment for his private library.

‘Homer’ or ‘Mohammed’ of Spanish poetry? Sublime or heretical? Does Góngora ‘speak’ the dominant ideology or is his art the practice of an outsider and rebel? The answer is both. Why this is the case is what I want to outline here.

What is specific to Góngora's poetry is his deliberate, some would say perverse, cultivation of difficulty. As Panofsky demonstrated, the Italian Mannerists had advanced in the sixteenth century the idea of difficulty per se —dificoltà— as an aesthetic property.