Luis de Góngora and the mythological fable of the Golden Age: Classification of texts and lexical analysis using computer methods

After the dissemination of Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in 1613, a number of Spanish poets expanded the treatment of myths and established a dialogue with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As a result of this process, a great amount of short epic poems was composed in the following years. This article aims to achieve three objectives: firstly, to describe in quantitative terms a corpus of 25 epyllia written by poets such as Luis de Góngora, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Juan de Jáuregui and Villamediana, among others. Secondly, the texts are classified using the Stylo package, which takes into account the most frequent words in an attempt to verify the traditional division between “dark” poets and “light” poets. Finally, the lexicon of these works is analyzed taking into consideration the keywords generated with AntConc, and the relative frequency of learned borrowings obtained using R.