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

Love, competition among poets for fame, temporality and tradition, Classical and Petrarchan intertexts, and the struggle with poetic language for expression: these are the themes that are woven throughout Isabel Torres’s Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Torres reads love not as a biographical door through which to access the poems, but as “a complex and contestatory signifier” (xii). In this book she proposes to read “Golden Age love poetry as poetry, but produced in response to a very concrete socio-political context – that is, the need to provide a polity in the throes of centralization and imperial expansion with a literary ‘tradition’ as proof of its national make-up” (xi). Which is to say, she reads the poems against the ideological backdrop of traslatio studii as a means of traslatio imperii. And though she is interested in the political and brings it to the fore, she is much more interested in the studii, the learning and erudition of the poets, and how they transform the Classical and Petrarchan traditions in their own lyric practices.

After moving through six chapters, readings dedicated to Garcilaso (two), Herrera (one), Góngora (two), and Quevedo (one), Love Poetry abruptly ends. That is to say, there is no concluding chapter that ties the book together. The choice to dispense with the traditional conclusion is not from a lack of imagination or vision on Torres’s part. Instead, it stems from a commitment to reading, to “lyric poetry, and to poets, individually . . . [and to paying] due regard to ‘the specificity and singularity’ of the textual products of the past” (x). Or as she says a little later on, a traditional conclusion would “[undermine] the book’s commitment to open-endedness, to the premise that poetry thrives on the promise of a reading not yet realised” (xv). Indeed, the strength of Love Poetry is how it weaves together a series of careful readings informed both by the intertextual allusions and references the poet is working with and against and also by the current critical readings of the poets in question. As she explicitly states regarding Garcilaso, her purpose is to “qualify our understanding” (4) of these poets, whether it be Garcilaso’s aesthetic of indirectness, Herrera’s intermediateness, Góngora’s “compulsion to nothingness” (122), or Quevedo’s use of metaphor. Her principal project is to see how the poet struggles with language, the tradition, and the art of expression and figuration to express desire and the self.

The Garcilaso chapters deftly move between Garcilaso and his Petrarchan and Classical referents to show how the Spanish poet worked within a poetics of imitatio to carry out a lyric self-fashioning and self-authorization. And, though of the poets in question, he might be the one who seems to most easily believe in the possibility of “infinite renewal” (34), she recognizes in Garcilaso’s poetics a troubling conundrum: how the poet, especially in Eclogue II, realizes that “[i]ndividual and community are interdependent rather than in opposition, yet the success of one is often realised through the sacrifice of the other” (59). Torres does not read Garcilaso according to the harmonizing Neoplatonism that some have seen in him. Instead, she focuses on his ambivalence, eroticism, and his struggle to capture human feeling and reality in language. As such, she notes that Garcilaso’s poetry already contains many of those traits typically associated with the Baroque. Through her careful reading we see how “the vulnerability of the voice, and of the written artefact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped by time are integral to the self-conscious poetics of Garcilaso” (34).

Herrera has long been considered simply a transitional figure between the great father of the new Spanish vernacular poetry, Garcilaso, and the rebellious son, Góngora. In Torres’s reading, instead, Herrera is a central and important figure in Spanish cannon. She begins her revision of Herrera by...