I am really enjoying The Poet and the Natural World in the Age of Góngora because Michael Woods is shifting away from a purely (or naively) Romantic conception of Nature. He follows Emilio Orozco's Paisaje y sentimiento de la naturaleza en la poesía española, to argue that a form of the pictorial landscapes (e.g. Nature qua esthetic category) begins in the 16th century.
The difference between a Romantic Nature and Baroque Nature is precisely its sentiments towards the nonhuman world. In Góngora, for instance, these sentiments are infamously "nebulous". To quote Dámaso Alonso:
Everwhere...there flows an awed spirit of exaltation in natural forces: beneath the most precise lines, beneath the most splendid words, there lies the vital flame of creative and regenerative nature, like a passionate ebullience" (71).
As Woods points out, there are several aspects of this marvelous sentence that should be read with care. For me, what it might mean to suggest a "vital flame" of regeneration. On whose part? Woods takes us in an interesting direction on this point, to suggest that it is the sincerity of the poem that might lead us the particular constructedness of a natural poetics.
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