Las voces que forjaron un mito: la poesía épica sobre la guerra de los Ochenta Años

This work presents the corpus of epic poems devoted to celebrating the military operations of the army of the Catholic Monarchy in the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648). This subgenre within Hispanic heroic poetry has been relegated to an accessory position in the critical discussion despite the fact that it constituted to a large extent the space in which the meaning of the conflict was elaborated. A first approach to the corpus allows to follow the process of construction of the myth of the Habsburg army as the inheriting structure of the Roman legions and protector of the values ​​of Catholicism, sustained by its technological primacy and by the ethos of its men. The poems that compose it form a choral tradition that orchestrates the voices of the poet, the soldier and the empire, allowing them to differ, overlap, merge or conflict. They also maintain a dialogue with classic and modern epic tradition, strategically assimilated under a notion of the genre as a flexible framework which includes quite experimental proposals.