David Gareth Walters e-mail(Login required)

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David Gareth Walters e-mail(Login required)

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68
This essay departs from the likelihood that Francisco de Quevedo would have visited Tommaso Campanella in the prison of San Elmo in Naples between 1614 and 1618. The poetic focus comprises sonnets by both poets: Campanella’s «Il mondo è il libro» and Quevedo’s «Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos». There is initially an exploration of the appropriateness of the sonnet’s structure for prison poetry: the closed form and the ease with which it can be memorised. The concept of the sonnet as an inhabited space is further developed to embrace the central concern of the two sonnets: the topos of the world as a book. Through a close analysis of these poems and by allusion to other writers (Drummond, Owen, Gracián) a number of variants of the topos are identified: analogy (world=book); negative version or inversion of analogy (world>book) —as in the case of the Campanella sonnet; inversion of analogy (book=world); negative inversion of analogy (book

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