A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Gongora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is...