“It has always been the natural intent of a victorious people to endeavor to spread the use of its language at least as far as the limits of its empire.” These are the opening words of Francisco de Medina’s introduction to Fernando de Herrera’s massive annotated edition ofThe Works of Garcilaso de la Vega, the book that, as I have said, did most to define for sixteenth-century Spaniards the meaning of Garcilaso’s poetic accomplishment. Penciled at this point into the margin of my university library’s facsimile copy of Herrera is the name “Nebrija.” The connection is obvious and right....

Arma virumque. So familiar were these opening words of theAeneid—“Arms and the man”—to sixteenth-century readers, or at least to readers who had anything of a humanist education, that even a small change would be immediately recognized as significant. Camões made just such a change inThe Lusiads. He beganAs armas e os barões, thus proposing to sing not “arms and the man” but rather “arms and the men.” Despite the central role Camões gives Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese nation, and especially itsbarões, its “noblemen” or “barons,” are to be his subject. In the miniature...

The project of reforming Spanish poetry along Italian lines was born in the precincts of empire. As Boscán tells the story in the famous letter to the duchess of Soma that introduces the second book of his and Garcilaso’s collected works, it was in Granada in 1526, shortly following the emperor’s marriage to Isabel of Portugal, that the Venetian ambassador, Andrea Navagero, who was also a renowned humanist and poet, suggested that Boscán try writing Spanish poems in Italian meters. No firm evidence assures us that Garcilaso accompanied the court from Seville, where the imperial marriage had been solemnized, to...

Garcilaso’s sonnet from Carthage turns on a single word:Aquí. This word and the tercet that follows from it are what have encouraged me to ignore the title that has been affixed to the poem since its first appearance in print—“To Boscán from Goleta”—and refer to it instead as a sonnet from Carthage. The usual title is in all likelihood an editorial addition. Never in the body of the poem does Garcilaso mention either the fortress of Goleta or the conquered city of Tunis. Instead, hisaquíturns our attention momentarily away from the present, which in the...

Garcilaso’s sonnet from Carthage consists of two sentences, each fit neatly into one of the poem’s two large metrical units. The first sentence fills the poem’s first eight lines, the octave; the second fills the final six lines, the sestet. But something of the extraordinary power of the poem comes from its both stopping and not stopping at the octave-sestet break. I have said that the poem turns on the single wordAquí. That is both true and not true.Aquínarrows and sharpens the poem’s focus and invites us, particularly once we get toCartago, to think of place...

In retrospect, whether in Spain, in France, or in England, the new poetry was seen as the work of not one but of two men. In his mocking appreciation of the estrangement of Castilian verse from its familiar patterns, Cristóbal de Castillejo credits both Boscán and Garcilaso. In Castillejo’s fantasy, Boscán and Garcilaso together descend into the underworld where they meet up with the astonished troubadours of earlier Spanish poetry. Similarly, though with none of Castillejo’s comic reservation, Michel de Montaigne praises both Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay for having raised French verse “to the highest point it...

How does it happen that a single sonnet can be made to stand for and even anticipate a literary movement that had begun less than a decade earlier in Spain and that in the coming decades was to spread through much of western Europe? Would just any poem do? Is the whole contained in each of its parts as the genetic material of a whole organism is found in each of its cells? In some way that may be the case. In its metrical and generic form, in its diction and figurative language, in its alienation from earlier vernacular poetry,...

Señor Boscán, one who takes pleasure in relating his thoughts, even of things that have no name, will never be at a loss for matter with you, nor will need to seek out a ready style other than that pure ornament which befits a learned epistle. Among the very great benefits our perfect friendship grants us is this free and pure informality, far from affected weightiness; and thus, enjoying that liberty, I say I came with as sure a step as that with which I rode for twelve days, as you will only see as you make your way to...

Mario, this ungrateful love, as witness to my pure faith and my great steadfastness, exerting his vile nature in me by most harming him who is most his friend,

fearing that if I write and speak of his nature, I debase his grandeur, not content with his own efforts at cruelty, has strengthened my enemy’s hand;

and thus, in the place that governs my right hand and in that which declares my soul’s conceits, was I injured.

But I will make that offense dearly cost the offender, now that I am cured, free, desperate, and wronged....

Here, Boscán, where Mantuan Virgil preserves the good Trojan Anchises’ ashes with eternal name and life,

under the illustrious standard of Caesar Africanus, we find ourselves, the victors, gathered:

diverse in our purposes, some dying to harvest from our efforts the fruit that we sowed with sweat;

others (who make virtue the friend and prize of their labors and want people to think and say as much)

differ from the others in public, while in private God knows how much they contradict what they profess.

I take the middle way, for I never really cared to strive for wealth, and...

Though this heavy occasion has touched my soul with such emotion that I need consolation

to lighten the burden of my thought and end the force of my continuous weeping,

I nevertheless wanted to test whether I had sufficient imagination to write you something consoling, despite the state I am in, that might serve

to lessen the fury of your recent grief, if the muses can uplift a heavy heart

and put an end to your plaints, at which the inhabitants of Pindhos already show hurt and confusion;

for as far as I know, neither when the sun shines, nor...

Since the power to draw the bow of religion and of fierce war back farther to such an extent that its curved ends meet without resistance

the muse has granted to you alone, learned Sepúlveda, in a similar manner it falls to you also to tell of fearful Africa under an intrepid and pious king,

who mounted on his famous pied stallion, moves rapidly through the tight ranks, outrunning the swift wind, fervent as he brandishes the death-dealing lance in his hand;

to whom the rabble yields just as the light stubble gives way to flames in a dry grove...