Garcilaso de la Vega: Life, Works, and Poetic Style
Garcilaso de la Vega
Themes
- The Petrarchan Conception of Love: This is in the tradition of an impossible love inspired by his beloved. When Garcilaso describes the woman he loves, he always represents the Petrarchan ideal.
- Idealized Nature, Refined and Harmonious: A desire to escape courtly life and a longing for rest and peace, leading to the description of fresh meadows, rivers, etc.
- Mythology: Garcilaso recreates myths that combine love, despair, and death.
Style
Serene and simple, without artifice, expressing feelings with ease and musicality. His elegance seeks language without losing the melancholic tone. Among the most important stylistic traits in Garcilaso’s poetry is the use of metaphor, epithet, hyperbaton, personification, and alliteration. Three stages:
- The Influence of Hispanic Poetry: In this early stage, there are literary influences of traditional love poems. He writes Castilian songbooks, ignoring the outside world or the physical features of the beloved in the Petrarchan mode.
- Assimilation of the New Art and Petrarch: Petrarch had a great impact on Garcilaso. From him, he took meters, stanzas, themes, images, and the design of female beauty and landscape. His stay in Italy brought him closer to the classic works of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.
- Wholeness: After the death of his beloved, he composed some of his most beautiful works. His literary maturity provides a serene vision of love and nature.
Artwork
It is not too extensive. He composed three eclogues, two elegies, one letter, four songs, “Ode to the Flower of Knidos”, thirty-eight sonnets, and eight Castilian poems. In the sonnets and songs, Garcilaso combines Petrarchan style with loving rhetoric and lyrical topics of the cancionero. The elegies are a sample of the influence of the classics.
The eclogues are the most important works by this author:
- Eclogue 1: This is the most significant because it perfectly combines the passion of love and formal perfection. In it, the poet projects his own experience of love onto two shepherds, Salicio and Nemoroso.
- Eclogue 2: This is the most extensive. It consists of two parts: the first relates the unhappy love affair between Camila and the shepherd Albanio; the second is an allegorical apology from the House of Alba.
- Eclogue 3: This is a poem written in stanzas. Four nymphs embroider scenes depicting love stories: the first three spin mythological stories, and the fourth tells the story of the nymph Elisa and the shepherd Nemoroso.
Sentence Classification
A) By Predicate Voice
- Active: Transitive (has a direct object), intransitive (no direct object), reflexive (the pronoun is the direct or indirect object), reciprocal, impersonal.
- Passive: The subject receives the action of the verb.
B) By Speaker’s Attitude
Declarative, hesitant, interrogative (total, partial, with “whether” or “not”, direct with “?”, and indirect without), exclamatory, wishful, imperative (expresses a request or mandate).
C) Predicate Complements
- Predicate: Expresses a quality or state (not with copular verbs).
- Prepositional Phrase: Depends on, counts on, etc.
- Noun Phrase: Noun plus preposition.
- Agent Complement: Introduced by “by” or “from” (only in passive voice).