Baroque Style

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Recommended: John Milton’s Paradise Lost as an Epic Poetry Essay

The word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word `barocco', meaning irregular pearl. Until nineteenth century the word baroque was used mostly as a fancy synonym for `absurd' and `grotesque'. The characteristic feature of this style is energy, lack of harmony, attraction for the ornate and an explosive elaboration, which almost conceals the underlining order or pattern.

M. H Abrams in, `Glossary of Literary Terms' defines baroque as a ."..term applied by the art historians to a style of architecture, sculpture and painting that developed in Italy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century and then spread to Germany and other countries of Europe. The style employs the classical form of Renaissance, but breaks them up and intermingles them to achieve elaborate, grandiose, energetic, and highly dramatic effects."

Imbic Buffum defines baroque style to be a style exbeating awareness of both beauty and horror of the diverse and dynamic physical world, an "almost perverse pleasure" in shock, and hope for the eventual triumph of the highest value.

Wilie Sypher sees baroque as a " sumptuous, pompous, invigorating, fleshly, authoritarian" style - and exuberant and resonant declaration of the " glories of Heaven and Earth with an emphasis on earth."

The word baroque has come to be applied to literature and especially to poetry. Milton's Paradise lost (1667) and Thomas De Quincey's prose description of his dreams in `Confession of an English Opium Eater' (1822) are few examples of baroque writing.

. . . what though the field be lost?

And all is not lost; the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

And what else not be overcome?

(Milton's `Paradise Lost')

As Sypher recognized, the style can lead to absurdities; Dryden in his youth produced an instance of baroque verse in his elegy on Lord Haistings, who died of small pox. An except follows:

"Blisters with pride did swell'd, which through flesh did sprout

Like rose-buds, stuck i' the Lily skin about,

Each little Pimple had a tear in it,

To wail the fault its rising did commit...

Or were those gems sent to adore his skin

To Cab'net of richer soul within?"

The usual examples of baroque writing come from the work of Richard Crashaw whose sensuous conceits appear in the closing lines of `prayer' that he composed in the form of "An ode, which was prefixed to the little Prayer-book given to a young gentle woman.

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