Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire by Isabel Torres (review)

At the very outset of Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire, Isabel Torres states that she originally intended to write “a Companion volume to Golden Age poetry” (vii). And although this book differs greatly from a standard companion volume, the admission underscores the effort to sum up and culminate a fruitful and perhaps dominant strand of interpretation of Spanish Golden Age poetry among Anglo-American critics in the last two decades. The original intent, furthermore, remains visible in some of the most salient characteristics of the book: the useful review of previous criticism on each poet; the deft dialogue with critical theory, without ever being constrained by a single approach; and the focus on hyper-canonical poets, with the acknowledged absence of Lope de Vega. For that same reason, the book also delineates a map of what remains to be done and what is next in the study of early modern Hispanic poetic production.

Torres’s arguments mainly benefit from and build upon two very influential books on Spanish Golden Age love poetry. Along the lines set by Roland Greene in Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), Torres considers that in Spanish Golden Age love poetry, the male desire for female beauty articulated primarily through the Petrarchan poetic code is “symbolically coupled with the aspirations of empire” and the “possession of the beloved [is] translated often into colonial ownership” (81–82). But Torres develops Greene’s insight in two ways. Firstly, her book explores the imbrication in Spanish Golden Age love poetry of this amatory and imperial eros with eris or strife, the “eristic aemulatio” so central to European, and thereby Spanish, humanism: “the desire to rival Classical and Renaissance vernacular models” (16). And secondly, her book focuses “on the imperial ‘home’ space” in order to show how unstable and far from fixed was this space from which Spanish imperial and Castilian linguistic identity emanated (ix). In this sense, her book continues on the path explored by Ignacio Navarrete in Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). In addition to covering exactly the same poets as Navarrete (minus Boscán), she complements his readings of Petrarch with well-informed and engaging ones of Virgil, Ovid and other Latin poets that the Spanish poets under discussion were eristically imitating.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age consists of a preface and six chapters. Each chapter breaks down into sections, which guide the reader through prose that can prove challenging. The preface presents the main premises and justifies the focus on love and on canonical poets. As to the former, Torres wants to show what love is actually doing; as to the latter, she maintains that they serve the interests of the dominant ideology (xii). Chapter one focuses on the drama of poetic self-assertion and self-creation within the imperial context in the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. The pioneer of the new poetry endeavored to imitate the Petrarchan model and thus accomplish the transfer of cultural authority to Spain, crowning the transfer of political authority. But in the process, as Torres shows, the speaking subject ran the risk of being lost, a dialectic articulated in the famous sonnet on Apollo and Daphne, “A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían.” The exploration of the intersection of empire and individuality, of soldierly duties and lyrical subjectivity in Garcilaso continues in chapter two, which deals with poems that imbricate love and war, most notably the “Ode ad florem Gnidi,” the sonnet “A Boscán desde La Goleta” and Eclogue 2. In reading these, Torres shows the ways in which Garcilaso exposes “the informing contradiction of identity formation” (59).

The third chapter reinforces the Garcilaso-Góngora polarity by focusing on Fernando de Herrera, although Torres manages to read him in his own right, not as a mere imitator...