Representation of human body in Francisco de Quevedo’s poetry

The article deals with some aspects of perception and representation of human body in baroque poetry, analyzing mainly satirical and burlesque poems by the Spanish baroque author Francisco de Quevedo as examples. The study focuses on the problem of representing the body, and Quevedo’s poetic writings reveal the problem on two different levels: the theme (subject) and the poetic language. Two opposing trends have been identified. On the one hand, the body is ultimately reduced to some part of it or even to a clothes item, and, on the other, the body is transformed into a corpus or catalogue which lists objects of the external, or “big”, world. All this is connected with reconsideration, within the framework of the Quevedian anthropology, of Renaissance ideas of a harmonious correlation between the micro- and the macrocosm. On the conceptual level, representation leads to a peculiar condensation, or concentration, of the image. Becoming material and vivid, becoming substantive, it summarizes at the same time either “ready-made” stories or “ready-made” canonic discourses that the reader must reconstruct in their entirety in order to approach comprehension of the meaning or meanings embodied in a literary work.