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From Scipio to Nero to the Self: The Exemplary Politics of Stoicism in Garcilaso de la Vega's Elegies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

E. C. Graf
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Abstract

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 5 , October 2001 , pp. 1316 - 1333
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

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