The Early Modern Sonnet’s Lessons of Petrarchism and Militarism

THE EARLY MODERN SONNET’S LESSONS OF PETRARCHISM AND MILITARISM Dana Bultman University of Georgia I f a historian’s reflections on the rhetoric of poetry from the sixteenth century are any indication, scholars from parallel fields looking in clearly view the genre of the sonnet as a vehicle for Spain’s imperial ambitions. Geoffrey Parker remarks that traditionally anthologized lyrics like Hernando Acuña’s “Soneto al rey nuestro señor” along with the, “verses of Spain’s other soldier-poets[,] such as Francisco de Aldana, Alonso de Ercilla and Fernando de Herrera, … displayed a self-intoxicating rhetoric which called for Spain to conquer the world” (102). From within the field of early modern literature we are familiar with how studies of the courtly sonnet tradition have changed. The legacy of the Petrarchan sonnet was once central to poetry’s elevated status in the values promoted by New Criticism. But these formal hierarchies are now antiquated, having served the interests of only a small group of readers. Later generations of critics identified the sonnet as a key literary tool for reinforcing the subject position of the ruling classes. When John Beverley quotes Roland Greene’s argument that “Petrarchism operates as the original colonial discourse in the Americas,” he is broadening the implications Greene assigns to the sonnet to include all of literature remarking, “literature of any sort was a condition for the formation of the subject-form of the colonial elites” (29).1 The power dynamics of the courtly sonnet came to be seen as a microcosm of those of an entire literary technology unleashed at the service of European cultures in violent expansion. Insightful arguments such as these reveal the class interests and imposed social structures implicit in writings which would be disingenuously read as personal or universal utterances. At the same time, they may give credence to limited views, sometimes encouraged by anthologies used for teaching, of both the variety found among early modern sonnets and of the critical awareness of poets who wrote them from positions outside court circles of power. As Anthony Cascardi has advised, care should be taken in reading, “absolute power absolutely, thus yielding to the seduction that sometimes ascribes to the thesis of culture the sum of power’s effects” (239). The central CALÍOPE Vol. 11, Number 2 (2005): pages 33-43 34 Dana Bultman D D D D D literary place assigned to the sonnet as genre is arguably more of a modernist than an early modern designation. Spanish writers lent equal weight to mode—for example amorous, burlesque, or sacred—when determining the literary value of a work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an effort to contextualize and place Spanish Baroque texts within a theoretical view of literature’s relationship to power, Tom Lewis and Francisco J. Sánchez have also observed “that literature establishes the conditions for thinking (about) the self as an entity directly dependent on the state, insofar as the state, above and beyond its embodiment as a set of juridical, political, and military institutions, is also a structured web of symbolic discourses” (xvi). This statement provides a nuanced basis upon which to proceed to study militarism and the sonnet as well as the subject positions conditioned by poetry. Literary forms do not simply serve as vehicles for state interests, but rather they structure how individual voices can engage the discourses that support the state. With this in mind, my teaching of early modern poetry begins by questioning the assumption that genre and ideology are always clearly linked. Opposing and comparing literary types can lead students to a reductive simplification of works, and many genres with a slightly more contemporary feel, such as Francisco de Quevedo’s satirical Sueños, critique social ills from an aristocratic vantage point that offers traditionally punitive solutions for disobedient underlings. If we oppose pastoral poetry to picaresque narrative for example, as Claudio Guillén did, then the comparison might very well show poetry to encapsulate the ideals of a retrograde court culture, rather than the gritty lived experience of roads and towns found in the developing form of the novel that will accompany humanity into the democratic age...