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

In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to the historical and social pressures found in the “imperial ‘home’ space” (ix). Torres takes as a starting point the “nagging” question “What has love got to do with it?” However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on the other hand, purely formal answer to the question. Instead, the author prefers to inquire “what love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does” (xii). The context is an imperial Spain in which the idealism and anxiety of an emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in the coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.

The section on Garcilaso de la Vega focuses on the tension made patent between a productive imitation of the Petrarchan model—which transforms and nourishes the work—and a “project of lyric self-creation” that simultaneously needs to move beyond “imitative/emulative” poetics (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to the analysis. In Chapter 1, “Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation,” the author delves into the synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading an erasure of the residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how the reader is faced with what seems to be “an objective site of aesthetic contemplation” that can nonetheless only be accessed through “immersion in a subjective imagination that is rendered in deceptively material terms” (29). The summing statement for the analysis of Eclogue III follows the same logic: “The anxieties expressed in the text about the vulnerability of the voice, and of the written artifact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped in time, are integral to Garcilaso’s self-conscious poetics. But in Eclogue III such concerns are balanced by a sophisticated self-elaboration that is enabled and sustained through appropriation, and by the sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal” (34).

Chapter 2, “Garcilaso de la Vega: luz de nuestra nación?,” further explores the manifest—and less clearly resolved—tensions in the poet’s more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically the imbalance in the arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates an encounter between the aesthetic distance provided by letters and the “anguished questioning of a subject voice” which cannot escape the tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from the position of the conqueror to the position of the conquered, displays a transfer also between the historical past, literature’s role in the creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poet-soldier’s intimate experience, all together revealing how “the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with the anxieties of the old” (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with the aim of bridging the apparent incongruity in the shift between the pastoral scene and the historical account of the House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies the consistency throughout of “water/mirror poetics” (59), which play out inherent tensions between reality and illusion, past and present, art and time (as found in ekphrasis), and integration and disintegration both at the level of the self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to an emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso’s political poetry as harmonizing the arms and letters...