A young man is shipwrecked on a desert island. As he struggles through tangles of exotic foliage he spots a distant flicker of light and hears a dog bark. He stumbles into a campsite where a group of goatherds sits around a fire. He doesn’t ask for a dry blanket or a slice of roasted goat but addresses the gaping goatherds in lofty tones: “What a sanctuary for all seasons!” He praises the pungent campsite as a “green chapel” and a “sacred grange.” When he’s fed, he feasts not on plain goat jerky, but enjoys “slivers of crimson flesh.” In this never-never land, nothing is what it seems. The campfire is a “great moth resolved to ashes.” The birds are “soft bells of ringing feathers.” Here the goat’s milk is “so white” it makes the lilies blush on the “fair brow” of dawn. Here anything can turn into anything else, and only extravagance rules.

Welcome to the bizarre, baroque world of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), greatest of Spanish poets, and his unfinished masterpiece, “The Solitudes.” No weirder poem has ever been written. In “Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora” (University of Chicago, 320 pages, $30), edited and translated by John Dent-Young, the full measure of this strangeness appears. As Mr. Dent-Young shows in his excellent introduction and notes, as well as in his fine verse translations, Góngora cannot be reduced to a mere rhetorician. (Coincidentally, another handsome selection of Góngora’s sonnets, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, has just been re-issued, George Braziller, 176 pages, $19.95, translated by Allan Trueblood.) The man who peers out at us from the magnificent portrait that Diego Velázquez painted of him in 1622 — included as a frontispiece here — presents a face bisected by light and shadow in equal measure. Góngora delighted in fanciful figures of speech but kept his feet planted firmly on the Spanish earth.

Although he was trained as a lawyer and served in a minor ecclesiastical office in later years, Góngora was a boisterous character, addicted to gambling and cards. He was a fervent aficionado of bullfighting, and was continually involved in brawls, especially with fellow poets. His love life was vexed. In one of his ballads, he complains of the “many idiocies / I committed to paper,” and that “for sometimes a thousand / days I ate nothing / but my own fingernails, / writing you sonnets!” Góngora is the great poet of transformations, but not all of them are exquisite. When he kept vigil beneath his beloved’s window, her dog took him for a gatepost “and raising his leg / with elegant insolence / plated my best / black shoes with silver!”

Along with his contemporaries Lope de Vega and Francisco de Quevedo (who hated him and evicted him from his home in old age), Góngora was a master of the sonnet. Toward the end of his life, he wrote:

During this westering hour, my friend, in this
Climacteric, these last five years of all,
Every ill-placed step denotes a fall,
And every minor fall’s a precipice.

It would be easy to dismiss Góngora as a purveyor of euphemism; as a poet who couldn’t call a rooster a rooster, preferring to dub him a “coral-bearded sultan.” But that would be a mistake. Góngora’s images intensify the things they touch; they only seem ornamental. For him, ornament, lovingly applied, was a way of surrounding an object — a goat, a lily, a young girl, or a tree — so that its shifting essence might stand revealed in several dimensions at once. Centuries before his countryman Picasso, he was a cubist of sorts, revelling in the multiple glints the edges of his words cast forth.

In “The Solitudes,” Góngora describes a turkey, of all things, as though it were a jewel, bending its “nacreous corrugated brow over the ragged / sapphire” of its neck. His description of cranes “ploughing the oceans of the empty air” and “writing winged characters / on the diaphanous page of the sky/with their feathered quills” is exact and lovely. But he can be blunt too. In 1521, 40 years before Góngora’s birth, Cortés had vanquished the Aztec empire. In “The Solitudes,” the poet denounces the greed of the conquistadores who “transported so much pain / to worlds so many seas apart!”

We can easily imagine the comical effects that Cervantes, his older contemporary, would have drawn from the confrontation between the shipwrecked youth and the dumbstruck goatherds at the opening of “The Solitudes,” but Góngora ignores its humorous potential. He’s intent on evoking a new world, innocent of greed, flattery, and the poisons of the court (of which he had bitter experience). It’s a world of artifice, and Góngora had to create it as such: His is a poetry of pure energy, where the word acts as a corrosive medium, beautifying objects even as it dissolves them.

Góngora was among the few poets condemned by the Inquisition, and not for his content but for his style. That style still provokes and inspires. Federico García Lorca (whose “Green I want you green” could be a line by Góngora) championed his work. Pablo Neruda’s “Elemental Odes,” with their baroque praise of potatoes and socks, sprang from Góngora’s example. The old wizard continues to invent the world.

eormsby@nysun.com