Garcilaso de la Vega: Spanish Renaissance Poet
Garcilaso de la Vega
Work
Garcilaso is one of the greatest Spanish poets, known for formal perfection and significant influence across centuries. However, his poetry remained unpublished during his lifetime. His works were first published in 1543 in Barcelona by the widow of Juan Boscán, who edited the poetry of the two friends in a volume titled *Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega*.
The Toledo-born author cultivated two types of poetry of the time: traditional Castilian poetry (eight-syllable couplets) and Italianate poetry, to which he owes his fame and significance. His Italianate works include five songs, forty sonnets, three eclogues, two elegies, and an epistle.
Features
- Influence of Latin and Renaissance Themes and Forms: Authors such as Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Sannazaro greatly influenced his poetry.
- Poetic Language: His ideal was to achieve transparency and clarity in expression, avoiding elaborate artifice.
- Themes: In his pastorals and other compositions, Garcilaso often employs common themes or commonplaces, such as:
- The *locus amoenus*, a mythical, beautiful, and stylish landscape.
- Female beauty, which always corresponds to a rosy and fair complexion, white skin, blue eyes, a long neck, and fair hair.
- The idealization of the shepherd, contrasting with the crude reality.
- The *carpe diem*, alluding to the transience of life and inviting one to enjoy it while possible.
The Eclogues
As seen in Unit 11, eclogues are pastoral poems, compositions in which two or more shepherds express their romantic grievances within an idealized natural setting. Garcilaso wrote three eclogues during his Neapolitan period.
- Eclogue II: The first eclogue written by the poet, it is far from the perfection of the other two, despite some fine passages.
- Eclogue I: Shepherds Salicio and Nemoroso, each in twelve stanzas respectively, lament Galatea’s infidelity and the death of Elisa. While Garcilaso may not have attained the perfection and plasticity found in *Eclogue III*, the fusion of feeling, nature, and pastoral setting makes this poem one of his most famous and accomplished.
- Eclogue III: Four nymphs on the banks of the Tagus embroider canvases that evoke tragedies of love: three classical myths and a contemporary love that the poet also elevates to myth, that of Elisa (Isabel Freire) and Nemoroso (Garcilaso). The composition ends with a scene between two shepherds and nymphs immersed in the river’s water. Better than any other poem, these verses beautifully recreate the pastoral nature, the *locus amoenus*, and harmony between the elements of a landscape that invites solitude and rest.
The Sonnets
Garcilaso was the first great master of one of the most representative compositions of Spanish poetry: the sonnet.
The sonnet is a structure in which the contents are organized into related blocks. Garcilaso usually aligns the sentences with the lines and the blocks of thought with the verses of the sonnet. This demonstrates his classicism and his way of seeking harmony between form and thought.
Except for two or three poems, the theme of love runs through Garcilaso’s hendecasyllabic verse, in which appear the indifference, the harshness of the lady, disdain, absence, jealousy, and mourning for the death of the beloved.
Songs
Notable are *Song III* and *Song V*.
- Song III: Garcilaso wrote this during his exile on an island in the Danube. It is his first foray into the *locus amoenus*. It evokes the feeling of nature and foreshadows the sensual world of his Eclogues.
- Song V, entitled *Ode to the Flower of Cnidus*: This departs from the previous songs both in its meter and its content. Through his poems, Garcilaso tries to convince a lady from Naples to accept the love of a friend of the poet. The stanza used is not the *cuarteto*, but the *lira* (lyre).