A possible thistle from Lope de Vega’s garden: “¿Qué humanos ojos quedarán enjutos?” and its polemical context

Abstract

Within the vast oeuvre of Lope de Vega, we focus on his satires ad hominem in order to study a little-known sonnet that tradition attributes to him, "¿Qué humanos ojos quedarán enjutos?", the reply to a Góngora poem by the same title that dates from c. 1611. Examining both sonnets in their polemic context, we study their stylistic peculiarities, which are characteristic of the satirical corpus of their respective authors. Therefore, we conclude that the sonnet in question can be Lope’s, whose prickly thistles it resembles.