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

Abstract

TORRES, ISABEL. Love Poetry in Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. xv + 228 pp.In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to historical and social pressures found in 'home' space (ix). Torres takes as a starting point nagging question What has love got to do with it? However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on other hand, purely formal answer to question. Instead, author prefers to inquire love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does (xii). context is imperial Spain in which idealism and anxiety of emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.The section on de la Vega focuses on tension made patent between a productive imitation of Petrarchan model-which transforms and nourishes work-and a project of lyric self-creation that simultaneously needs to move beyond imitative/emulative (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to analysis. In Chapter 1, Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation, author delves into synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading erasure of residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how 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). summing statement for analysis of Eclogue III follows same logic: The anxieties expressed in text about vulnerability of voice, and of 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 sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal (34).Chapter 2, Garcilaso de la Vega: de nuestra nacion?, further explores manifest-and less clearly resolved-tensions in poet's more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically imbalance in arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates encounter between aesthetic distance provided by letters and anguished questioning of a subject voice which cannot escape tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from position of conqueror to position of conquered, displays a transfer also between historical past, literature's role in creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poetsoldier's intimate experience, all together revealing how the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with anxieties of old (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with aim of bridging apparent incongruity in shift between pastoral scene and historical account of House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies 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 level of self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso's political poetry as harmonizing arms and letters, and would offer poet as a model luz de la nacion, Torres highlights paradox of self as haunted by indeterminate human condition navigating imperial ideology as reflected in its literary reconstructions, revealing how success of individual and community often depends on sacrifice of one for other (59). …