El Parnaso español: Canon, mecenazgo y propaganda en la poesía del Siglo de Oro (review)

This book offers a fascinating, rewarding and often illuminating study of the importance of the myth of Mount Parnassus, Apollo and the Nine Muses in Spanish Golden Age poetry, especially insofar as the myth was used by Spanish writers from Juan de Mena and the Marquis of Santillana through Garcilaso de la Vega to Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Quevedo to create a canon of Spanish poets who deserved to reach the summit of Mount Parnassus. Vélez-Sainz begins his study with the origins of the myth and the Greek writers, Pausanias, Strabo, Hesiod, Homer, who first described Parnassus and the Muses. Virgil, Horace and Propertius later introduced changes into the myth, the most important being the notion of ascent or pilgrimage to the summit and the importance that this has in terms of the literary journey undertaken by the writer to reach the heights of fame, to appear in the literary canon.

The next major period for Mount Parnassus is fourteenth-century Italy and its trio of ‘canonical’ writers: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Dante will be portrayed by Giovanni di Paolo receiving the laurel crown from Apollo, the first truly crowned poet laureate; Petrarch possessed a manuscript of the works of Virgil which showed Virgil with a quill in his hand and his eyes turned in rapture towards the Muses; while Boccaccio, like Petrarch, conceived a literary programme that would create an Italian vernacular Parnassus. It would be from these poets that fifteenth-century Spanish writers like Mena and Santillana would bring into Spanish literature the most important aspects of Parnassus and the Muses. But it would be the greatest poet of the sixteenth century, Garcilaso de la Vega, who properly understood the ambitions of his Italian precursors and set out in his poetry to emulate and, if possible, to outdo his canonical predecessors. He had clearly in mind two poets in particular: Virgil for the epic and Petrarch for the lyric. As Vélez-Sainz notes: ‘el lenguaje de la canonización en el momento literario histórico de Garcilaso no solamente reflejaba el lenguaje de la fama de la épica de tono virgiliano sino también el de un segundo modelo, Petrarca, cuya lírica también buscaba la autorización personal del poeta’ (71). The sections on Garcilaso are, to my mind, among the most interesting of the whole book; the analyses of sonnets XXIV and XXXIII are particularly stimulating, as the author shows how through them Garcilaso created an allegory of the journey to Parnassus: ‘Garcilaso conquista la cumbre del Parnaso y crea el Parnaso español. Esto se confirma en cuanto este poema [Soneto XXIV], en principio tan irrelevante dentro de las selecciones contemporáneas de poesía áurea, es uno de los poemas del toledano más citados en el XVII. Tan popular era que Cetina y Cervantes en sus propias obras y los comentaristas de Lope, Góngora y Quevedo dicen seguir el cursus de Garcilaso hacia la difícil cumbre de Helicón, es decir, hacia la formación del canon renacentista’ (79).

Garcilaso leads us to the three most important Spanish poets of the seventeenth century: Lope de Vega, Góngora and Quevedo. Here, their journey to Parnassus is narrated via Cervantes’s El viaje del Parnaso (which is analysed particularly well), the Chacón manuscript of the works of Góngora, González de Salas’s posthumous edition of Quevedo’s poetry in El Parnasso español, and Lope’s own voluminous works on the subject, including the obvious Laurel de Apolo and the perhaps less obvious Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos. In addition, there is a useful section on the incidence of the myth of Parnassus, Apollo and the Muses in the literary academies of seventeenth-century Spain and their central role in creating a canon...