From Garcilaso to Argensola: The Cosmos Reordered

Few exercises illustrate the shattering of imperial aristocratic confidence brought on by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so well as a comparison between Garcilaso de la Vega’s eclogues, and the sonnet “A una muger que se afeitaba y estaba hermosa,” attributed to one of the Argensola brothers, usually Lupercio. Taken together these two works reveal clearly the trust in a vision of a well-ordered cosmos that unified Garcilaso’s world, and the extent to which the Baroque aesthetic reflects a cosmic vision founded on ideas of deceit and deception. Two Italians, Castiglione and Galileo, play important roles in this transition and this study seeks also to illuminate their influence on the course of Spanish poetry in the Siglo de Oro. Until the last two decades of the twentieth century many Garcilaso interpreters read his works, especially the eclogues, as poemes a clef, autobiography disguised in pastoral dress. Most recently this problem, which is also one of “sincerity,” has been discussed clearly and thoroughly by Daniel Heiple, who locates the poetic yo in a Petrarchan rhetoric of emotion rather than in the person of the poet (3-27). In spite of dedicating his attention primarily to Garcilaso’s sonnets, Heiple observes of the eclogues, “Garcilaso’s late poems show a self-awareness of style and a conscious distancing of the authorial voice . . . the poet consciously removes the poetic voice from the person who suffers to that of a disinterested narrator” (23).