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Abstract
Separated by more than half a century, Garcilaso de la Vega and Luis de Góngora chose the lyric genre to interrogate systems of power and the political and cultural changes that occurred from the early sixteenth century to the beginnings of the seventeenth century. Garcilaso's ‘new’ poetry and his conflictive engagement with the emerging Spanish empire made manifest the tensions between the epic's externalized political function and the lyrical expression of emotional intimacy. Moreover, the analysis of several sonnets reveals the tensions between spiritual faith and intellectual reason that echoed the period's unorthodox theology and led him to lament imperial power. For his part, Góngora seemed to eschew overt poetic subjectivity, often using his lyric talents to cultivate Spain's most powerful nobles. His involvement in the economics of patronage presented a challenge: how to bridge the tensions between the lyric, with its topoi of desire and the constitution of a poetic self, on the one hand; and on the other, with the epic mode, considered more appropriate for the ‘alabanza de los grandes.’ In addition its generic hybridity, Góngora's panegyric poetry reveals an at times jaundiced perspective on the mechanisms of power within a unique literary subjectivity.
Notes
1 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1953), 29. For the concepts in Spain, see Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 16–18; and Mary Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015), 175.
2 See Richard Helgerson, A Sonnet from Carthage, Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Leah Middlebrook, Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (University Park: Penn State U. P., 2009); and Isabel Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013).
3 I cite from Elias L. Rivers’ modernized edition of Boscán's ‘Prefacio’ in Boscán y Garcilaso: su amistad y el Renacimiento en España (Sevilla: Sibila, 2011), 49.
4 Torres calls attention to the interrelatedness of poetry and patronage (Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 132); see also Elizabeth Wright, Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2001).
5 Garcilaso's critical role in the forging of the Spanish Renaissance is discussed most recently in: Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega; Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch and Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, among others.
6 All citations of Garcilaso are from Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética y textos en prosa, ed., prólogo & notas de Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001). For views of the poet's binary position, see José María Rodríguez García, ‘Epos delendum est: The Subject of Carthage in Garcilaso's “A Boscán desde La Goleta” ’, Hispanic Review, 66:2 (1998), 151–70; and Anne J. Cruz, ‘Arts vs. Letters: The Poetics of War and the Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain’, in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Frederick de Armas & Patrick Cheney (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002), 186–205.
7 See Rodríguez García, ‘Epos delendum est’. Barbara Simerka notes the lyric's greater significance in the Early Modern period (Barbara Simerka, Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain [University Park: Penn State U. P., 2003]). For a different reading, however, see Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 40, n. 18.
8 See John Dent-Young, ‘Introduction’, in Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega: A Bilingual Edition, ed. & trans. John Dent-Young (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–24 (p. 18).
9 Antonio Prieto, Garcilaso de la Vega (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1975), 129–30. Like Torres’ view of the sonnet, Carroll Johnson claims that this ‘resolutely lyrical poem’ becomes ‘infested’ with the language of epic […] thus breaking the binary distinction between public/personal and epic/lyric’ (Carroll Johnson, ‘Personal Involvement and Poetic Traditions in the Spanish Renaissance: Some Thoughts on Reading Garcilaso’, Romanic Review, 80:2 [1989], 288–304 [p. 300]).
10 Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 41.
11 Isabel Torres, ‘Moving in … Garcilaso de la Vega's “Dulces prendas por mi mal halladas” ’, in Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation, ed. Jean Andrews & Isabel Torres (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014), 41–57. Torres further demonstrates the sonnet's ambiguity by identifying the poet with Aeneas (Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 43). For Garcilaso's identification with Dido, see also Rodríguez García, ‘Epos delendum est’, 293–98; for a contrasting view of the parallel as a temporal rupture, see Elizabeth Amann, ‘Petrarchism and Perspectivism in Garcilaso's Sonnets (I, X, XVIII, XXII)’, The Modern Language Review, 108:3 (2013), 863–80 (pp. 869–80, 870–74).
12 Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 20.
13 For Neoplatonism in Garcilaso, see Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, 1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1985); and Daniel Heiple, ‘Neoplatonic Themes in the Love Sonnets’, in his Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance (University Park: Penn State U. P., 1994), 233–60. Bienvenido Morros, however, claims otherwise: ‘A diferencia de sus antecesores, Garcilaso no tiñó su amor con tonalidades neoplatónicas, sino que lo descubrió en su manifestación más sincera, como una obsesión patológica, producto de deseos profundamente sicalípticos’ (Bienvenido Morros, ‘Garcilaso, hombre del Renacimiento español’, Centro Virtual Cervantes <http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/garcilaso/anotaciones/morros.htm> [accessed 27 July 2016]).
14 Menéndez Pelayo y la literatura: estudios y antología, ed. María José Rodríguez Sánchez de León (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2014), 299. Usoz published Juan de Valdés’ ‘Ciento y diez consideraciones’ in Vol. 6 of Reformistas antiguos españoles (San Sebastián: Ignacio R. Baroja, 1862).
15 Rafael Lapesa compares the celestial sphere to the representation of the pagan Elysian Fields (Rafael Lapesa, La trayectoria poética de Garcilaso [Madrid: Istmo, 1985], 139), while Rivers calls Garcilaso's Égloga I neither Christian nor pagan, but syncretic ‘in the best sense’ (Garcilaso de la Vega: Poems. A Critical Guide, ed. Elias Rivers [London: Grant & Cutler in association with Tamesis Books, 1980], 72, n. 22). See Torres for a full discussion of the passage's classical intertexts (Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 26). Barnard also comments on the various critical approaches (Garcilaso de la Vega, 195, n. 9).
16 Garcilaso de la Vega: Poems, ed. Rivers, 30. If the Christian belief in Heaven is placed in doubt in Garcilaso's poems, so too is that of a Christian hell. Morros calls attention in Canción IV to the representation of a pagan hell, imitated from Lucrecius (Bienvenido Morros, ‘La Canción IV de Garcilaso como un infierno de amor’, Criticón, 80 [2000], 19–47).
17 Morros, ‘Garcilaso, hombre del Renacimiento español’, n.p.
18 Ángel Alcalá, ‘Introducción’, in Juan de Valdés, Obras completas, I. Diálogos. Escritos espirituales. Cartas, ed. & intro. de Ángel Alcalá (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1997), ix–lxxxii (pp. lxviii–lxix).
19 Alcalá, ‘Introducción’, in Valdés, Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, lxviii.
20 Alcalá, ‘Introducción’, in Valdés, Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, lxviii.
21 Erasmus dedicated his Education of a Christian Prince to Charles in 1516. See John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1495–1563 (New York: Fordham U. P., 1990).
22 Olin, Catholic Reform, 11–12.
23 Spanish translations were published in 1515, 1525, 1528 and 1529. See María Remedios Moralejo Álvarez, ‘Un Enquiridión desconocido’, Pecia Complutense, 8:15 (2011), 29–42. It was praised by Juan de Valdés in his Diálogo de la lengua (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1941), 114.
24 For this phenomenon exemplified through Early Modern armour, see Ida Sinkevic, Knights in Shining Armor: Myth and Reality, 1450–1650 (Piermont: Bunker Hill Publishing, 2006).
25 For a semiotics of Petrarch's self-creation, see John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel’, Diacritics, 5:1 (1975), 34–40; for a rejoinder, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Petrarch's Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991).
26 Enrico Fenzi believes that Petrarch's Africa was left unfinished because of his inability to reconcile his Christian faith with his celebration of a pagan hero. See Enrico Fenzi, ‘Dall’ “Africa” al “Secretum”: nuove ipotesi sul “Sogno di Scipione” e sulla composizione del poema’, in Il Petrarca ad Arquà: Atti del Convegno di Studi nel VI Centenario (1374–1974), ed. Giuseppe Billanovich & Giuseppe Frasso (Padua: Antenore, 1975), 61–115 (p. 85). J. Christopher Warner claims that Petrarch follows Augustine's recommendation to abandon ignoble love (J. Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005], 32).
27 For poem 366, see Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet in the Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1965), 83. For Petrarch's unreformed stance in the introductory sonnet ‘Voi ch’ascoltate’, see Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), 64–65.
28 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 323–24.
29 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 23.
30 See Pindar, Olympian 10, ‘it has been written in my mind’ (Pindar, Odes, ed. & trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien, Perseus Digital Library [1990], <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162%3Abook%3DO.%3Apoem%3D10> [accessed 27 July 2016]). For Sonnet V, ‘e’l nome che nel cor mi scrisse Amore’, see Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. & ed. Robert Durling (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1976), 41. All references are taken from this edition.
31 Curtius stresses the topos when commenting on Plato's comparison of the soul to a wax tablet (European Literature, 305).
32 Rafael Lapesa, Garcilaso: estudios completos (Madrid: Istmo, 1985), 62.
33 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras completas, con comentario, ed. Elias L. Rivers (Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1974), 76.
34 Sofía Carrizo Rueda, ‘Otra fuente para el soneto V de Garcilaso y la suerte del culto al amor’, Criticón, 38 (1987), 5–14.
35 Daniel Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance (University Park: Penn State U. P., 1994), 156.
36 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 24.
37 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras completas, ed. Rivers, 78, n. 11.
38 Garcilaso de la Vega,Obra poética, ed. Morros, 24.
39 Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, 157.
40 For an analysis of the Renaissance instinct—in Freudian terms, its stimulus—against what the authors call the modern preference for the object of desire, see William Kerrigan & Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1989).
41 Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, 156. I apply the term ‘diglossia’ according to Kluge, as a tactic with which to navigate between two opposing meanings. See Sofie Kluge, Diglossia: The Early Modern Reinvention of Mythological Discourse (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2014), 308.
42 Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, 157.
43 Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, 156.
44 ‘Amor, Amor un abit m’e tallat de vostre drap, vestint-me l’espirit: en lo vestir, ample molt l’e sentit, e fort estret, quant sobre mi ‘s posat’ (Les obres d’Auzias March, ed. Amadeu Pagès, 2 vols [Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1912–1914], II, 10). I thank Montserrat Pérez-Toribio and Elena Grau-Llevería for their help with the translations of the Catalan poems.
45 Les obres d’Auzias March, ed. Pagès, II, 10.
46 Robert Archer, ‘Introduction’, in Ausiàs March: Verse Translations of Thirty Poems, intro., trans. & notes by Robert Archer (Barcelona: Barcino/Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), 13–23 (p. 15).
47 Ausiàs March, Antología poética, trad. de Juan Antonio Icardo, prólogo de Ricardo Bellveser (Valencia: Huerga & Fierro Editores, 1997), ‘Presentación del autor’, 17.
48 Marie-Claire Zimmerman, Ausiàs March o l’emergència del jo (Barcelona: L’Abadia de Montserrat, 1998). See also Ángel Gregorio Cano Vela, ‘Indicios del pensamiento humanista en el “Cant spiritual” de Ausiàs March’, Lemir, 15 (2011), 47–58 (p. 52).
49 Robert Archer, ‘Ausiàs March and the “Baena” Debate on Predestination’, Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes, <http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ausias-march-and-the-baena-debate-on-predestination/html/d20890fc-21dc-4426-b386-214c2969f06e_5.html> (accessed 27 July 2016).
50 Robert Archer, ‘Ausiàs March, an Unfading Voice’, Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes, <http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor-din/ausias-march-an-unfading-voice/html/bcede10d-8afa-47d0-aaff-8d625e3818bb_2.html#I_0> (accessed 27 July 2016).
51 Albert Lloret, Printing Ausiàs March: Material Culture and Renaissance Poetics (Madrid: Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2013), 57.
52 Lloret's thorough study of the translation has discovered other censored fragments (Printing Ausiàs March, 57).
53 ‘Si com los sants, sentints la lum divina, / la lum del mon conegueren per ficta, / e menyspreants la Gloria mundana, / puys major part de Gloria sentien, / tot enaxi tinch en menyspreu e fastig / aquells desigs qui, complits, Amor minva, / prenint aquells que de l’esperit mouen, / qui no ‘s lassat, ans tot jorn muntiplica’ (Lloret, Printing Ausiàs March, 65).
54 Ausiàs March: páginas del ‘Cancionero’, intro., ed. & notas de Costanzo di Girolamo, trad. de José María Micó (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2004), cited in Cano Vela, ‘Indicios del pensamiento humanista’, 52.
55 Cano Vela, ‘Indicios del pensamiento humanista’, 56.
56 ‘Cathòlich só, mas la Fe no m’escalfa / que la fredor lenta dels senys apague, / car yo leix so que mos sentiments senten / a paradís crech perfe y rahó jutge’ (Cano Vela, ‘Indicios del pensamiento humanista’, 52).
57 For a history of the group, see John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: Devotio Moderna, Self-Made Societies, and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
58 Although alumbrados and Erasmists rejected Scholasticism and stressed inner spirituality, the latter were mainly Humanists who believed in free will and personal responsibility. See Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2005), 67. For alumbrados, see Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 13–14; and Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados: orígenes y filosofía (1525–1559) (Madrid: Taurus, 1980). For the alumbrados’ converso origins, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, trad. Antonio Alatorre (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983), 180–81.
59 Stephen Haliczer calls attention to the role of Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique to curb the criticism against Erasmus in Spain (Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 [Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990], 280). See also Bataillon, Erasmo y España, trad. Alatorre, for Manrique's defence of the Inchiridion, 192–93.
60 Alcalá, ‘Introducción’, in Valdés, Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, xlviii.
61 Valdés was of converso origins; see Daniel A. Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdés (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008), 161.
62 For Garcilaso's biography, see María del Carmen Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica/Marcial Pons, 2013); for Valdés, see Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance.
63 Among those accompanying the emperor were Garcilaso's brother, Pedro Laso; the Marquis of Villena; Alfonso de Valdés; and Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca, named Viceroy of Naples (Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas, 358–65).
64 Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas, 377.
65 Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, 18–19. See also Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance, 21.
66 Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, 9–11.
67 Castiglione, as papal nuncio, denounced Alfonso's defence of the emperor's attack on Rome. See Benjamin B. Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés: Otherwise Valdesso, Spanish Reformer in the Sixteenth Century (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1865), 75–83.
68 See Juan C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1970); and Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance, 28. The Diálogo was dedicated to the Marquis of Villena, Diego López Pacheco. Valdés has the Archbishop (one of three characters) say, ‘vos leed y estudiad en las obras de Erasmo y veréis cuán gran fruto sacáis; y dejado aparte esto, habéis de saber que entre las obras de este Erasmo hay un librito de coloquios familiares, el cual dice él que hizo para que los niños juntamente aprendiesen latinidad y cristiandad’ (Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la doctrina cristiana [Madrid: Red Ediciones, 2012], 29).
69 For the controversies, see Frank A. James, ‘Appendix II’, in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination: The Augustinian Inheritance of an Italian Reformer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 257–61.
70 Translated from the Latin by Wiffen, in Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés, 93.
71 For details of the episode, see Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas, 401–09, 415–18.
72 Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas, 418.
73 Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés, 94. Firpo states that in 1531 Valdés was in Rome as Clement VII's gentleman of the chamber. After his brother's death, Juan succeeded him as archivist in the Kingdom of Naples (Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, 30).
74 Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, 31. However, Crews states that he was not paid his secretarial salary for six years (Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance, 58).
75 The Academia's president in 1532 was Scipione Capece, who held meetings at his house and was closely associated with the Valdés circle in what Abigail Brundin has called a ‘fruitful crossover’ (Abigail Brundin, Vitoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation [Burlington: Ashgate, 2008], 41–42). For Valdés’ meetings, see Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés, 138.
76 Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance, 36–37.
77 Juan de Valdés, ‘Diálogo de doctrina cristiana’, in Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, 109.
78 Terence O’Reilly, ‘Juan de Valdés: Literary Criticism’, in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (forthcoming entry). My thanks to Professor O'Reilly for affording me a copy.
79 Fernando de Herrera misunderstood the sonnet's first sentence, complaining that it was weak: ‘Y la oracion parece que no tiene niervos y espiritu, que no solo no regala ni da contento, pero engendra fastidio’ (Garcilaso de la Vega y sus comentaristas. Obras completas del poeta, acompañadas de los textos íntegros de los comentarios de El Brocense, Fernando de Herrera, Tamayo de Vargas Azara, ed., intro. & notas de Antonio Gallego Morell [Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1966], 339).
80 Juan de Valdés, ‘Consideración 45’, in Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, 581.
81 Juan de Valdés, ‘Consideración 46’, in Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, 583.
82 Juan de Valdés, ‘Consideración 32’, in Obras completas, ed. Alcalá, 554–55.
83 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética, ed. Morros, 288.
84 See Laura Vilá, ‘Lírica laudatoria y retórica epideictica en las letras en el Renacimiento’, in Idea de la lírica en el Renacimiento (entre Italia y España), dir. María José Vega & Cesc Esteve (Pontevedra: Mirabel, 2004), 179–98 (p. 185).
85 Fernando de Vera y Mendoza, Panegírico por la poesía, ed. Carmen Delgado Moral, in Carmen Delgado Moral, ‘El Panegírico por la poesía de Fernando de Vera y Mendoza en la preceptiva poética del siglo de oro’, doctoral thesis (Universidad de Córdoba, 2013), 170; available online at <http://helvia.uco.es/xmlui/handle/10396/10879> (accessed 27 July 2016).
86 Robert Jammes, La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Manuel Moya (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1987), 218.
87 See Mercedes Blanco, Góngora o la invención de la lengua (León: Univ. de Léon, 2012) and, by the same author, ‘El Panegírico al duque de Lerma como poema heroico’, in El duque de Lerma: poder y literatura en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Juan Matas Caballero, José María Micó Juan & Jesús Ponce Cárdenas (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2011), 11–56; Ángel Luis Luján Atienza, ‘ “Mal haya el que en señores idolatra”: las formas de la poesía y el poder’, in Leer y entender la poesía: poesía y poder, coord. Martín Muelas Herraiz & Juan José Gómez Brihuega (Cuenca: Univ. de Castilla-La Mancha, 2005), 49–72 (available online at <https://www.upf.edu/todogongora/_pdf/Lujan_Mal_haya_el_que_en_senores_idolatra.pdf> [accessed 1 May 2015]); and Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, ‘El ciclo a los marqueses de Ayamonte: Laus naturae y panegírico nobiliario en la poesía de Góngora’, in XII Jornadas de Historia de Ayamonte, celebradas durante los días 20, 21, 22, 23 y 24 de noviembre de 2007 (Ayamonte: Ayuntamiento de Ayamonte, Área de Cultura, 2008),107–31; and Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, ‘Góngora y el conde de Niebla: las sutiles gestiones del mecenazgo’, Criticón, 106 (2009), 99–146.
88 Blanco, ‘El Panegírco al duque de Lerma como poema heroico’, 15.
89 Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 103.
90 See Jammes, La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Moya, 231–36 and Ponce Cárdenas ‘El ciclo a los marqueses de Ayamonte’ for a detailed historical and biographical background to the marquis and his family. Ponce Cárdenas, in addition, provides information on the intellectual milieu the marquis cultivated and a consideration of some of the poems in this series.
91 Jammes, La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Moya, 231.
92 Dámaso Alonso, Para la biografía de Góngora: documentos desconocidos (Madrid: Gredos, 1962), 241.
93 See Ponce Cárdenas, ‘El ciclo a los marqueses de Ayamonte’, 124 for more details on these transactions.
94 In his book on Garcilaso, A Sonnet from Carthage, for example, Helgerson lists friendship as one of the five engagements of the ‘new poetry’ in the sixteenth century, noting the importance of homosocial bonds to the literary revolution carried out by Garcilaso and Boscán (xvi). That the Marquis of Ayamonte apparently was himself a poet may have strengthened the bonds with Góngora. In the 1627 Panegírico por la poesía, Vera y Mendoza has this to say: ‘al marqués de Ayamonte nadie le aventaja en la castidad y afecto de sus versos’ (Panegírico por la poesía, ed. Delgado Moral, 284).
95 All quotes are taken from Luis de Góngora, Obras completas, ed. & prólogo de Antonio Carreira, 2 vols (Alcalá/Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 2000); but I have also consulted Biruté Ciplijauskaité's edition, Sonetos completes, ed., intro. & notas de Biruté Ciplijauskaité (Madrid: Castalia, 1985). The visit to Lepe, according to Jammes, took place in the spring of 1607 and would have a profound effect on the poet (La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Moya, 232).
96 See Juan Matas Caballero, ‘Las Soledades a la luz de los sonetos: la prefiguración del peregrino’, in La edad del genio: España e Italia en tiempos de Góngora, ed. B. Capllonch, S. Pezzini, G. Poggi & J. Ponce Cárdena (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2013), 317–30.
97 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 37.
98 See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 10.
99 See César Nicolás, ‘ “Al sol surcaba golfos bellos …”: culteranismos, conceptismo y culminación de un diseño retórico en Villamediana’, Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, 10 (1987), 265–94.
100 Nicolás cites, for example, the sonnet ‘Celso al peine de Clavela’ that Lope included in La Arcadia which begins with the following quatrain:
101 In Góngora o la invención de una lengua, Blanco briefly considers these three verses as examples of ‘el conceptismo como “imagen” razonada’ (75–76).
102 Otis Green, ‘The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos at Naples, 1610–1616’, Hispanic Review, 1:4 (1933), 290–308 (p. 291); Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, El gobierno de las imágenes: ceremonial y mecenazgo en la Italia española de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008), 214.
103 Quoted in Green, ‘The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos’, 293.
104 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herber, Whitman and Ashbery (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2005), 80.
105 W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 17.
106 See, for example, a poem dedicated to Ayamonte not commented in this essay: ‘Vencidas de los Montes Marïanos / las altas cumbres’. In a forthcoming article in Calíope, ‘The Space of Empire and the Place of Patronage in Sonnets by Luis de Góngora y Argote’, I analyse Góngora's use of space and place in his encomiastic poetry.
107 Carlos Primo Cano, ‘El conde de Lemos y la poesía encomiástica: breve noticia de algunos versos gongorinos’, in El duque de Lerma, ed. Matas Caballero, Micó Juan & Ponce Cárdenas, 11–56.
108 The allusion to ‘tantos soles’ is most likely a witty reference to the Argensola brothers. Cervantes in the Galatea had called them ‘dos hermanos / dos luceros, dos soles de la poesía’. Although she does not refer to Góngora's sonnet specifically, Aurora Egido cites Cervantes’ verses in ‘ “Dos soles de la poesía”: Lupercio y Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’ Argensola: Revista de Ciencias Sociales del Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 119 (2009), 15–40.
109 Jammes speculates that this line may refer to the vast library that Góngora's father had amassed: ‘Dada la edad de su padre [la biblioteca] debía contener, sobre todo, obras anteriores a 1550: por tanto es completamente normal que haya sido rica en libros ‘libres de expurgaciones’ (La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Moya, 185).
110 In his perceptive article on Góngora and power, Ángel Luis Luján Atienza briefly comments on these last lines saying ‘El recurso final a la salvación queda un poco frío, y como una salida despechada, también cargada de ironía’ (Luján Atienza, ‘ “Mal haya el que en señores idolatra” ’, 17).
111 Jammes, La obra poética de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, trad. Moya, 183.
112 Luján Atienza, ‘ “Mal haya el que en señores idolatra” ’, 5–6.
113 In an unsigned letter to Góngora, we find the following comment which while negating the poet's originality, indirectly confirms the association of poetic language and imperial expansion: ‘Y si vuesa merced es autor desta grandeza ha de ser o por haberla extendido tanto como ella, o por haberla dado igual perfección. La extension parece que tiene mayorse fundamentos: porque como la que tuvo la latina procedió de la extension de su imperio […] y desta misma extension del imperio español procedió de su lengua, sin debérselo a vuesa merced, de que no puede dudarse; y así viene a estar el engaño en atribuirse vuesa merced la perfección que le debemos’ (Obras completas, II, 488).
114 John Beverly, ‘Sobre Góngora y el gongorismo colonial’, Revista Iberoaméricana, 47:114–15 (1981), 33–44 (p. 43).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.