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Critics, anglophone critics in particular, not in the field of Hispanic literature, have declined to reckon with the poetry of Garcilaso. Thomas M. Greene in The Light in Troy disingenuously pleads incapacity: “[Imitatio] needs to be seen as a European phenomenon making a markedly different imprint on each particular nation and vernacular it touched… In defense of the neglect of other literatures, most notably Hispanic, I can only say that my incompetence to deal with them has saved a long book from growing longer” (2). Paul Alpers in What is Pastoral?, a splendid study, is frankly dismissive: “Tasso’s Aminta and Garcilaso de la Vega’s eclogues are generally known, I fear, only to specialists in their respective national literatures, and their literary distinction (unlike that of Don Quixote) does not survive translation” (X).
The subordination and neglect of Garcilaso by English-language scholars came to a halt in 2007 with the publication of a slender but highly significant volume by English professor Richard Helgerson, titled A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe. The Spanish poet was to have figured in the first chapter of “… a large comparative study of the self-consciously ‘new poetry’ of sixteenth-century Europe”. Nor was the past to be neglected as classical antiquity and Petrarch and sixteenth-century Italy were, properly, also to be consulted. But the work proposed would expend “… its greatest energies on Spain, France, and England—the Spain of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega, the France of Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, and the England of Sir Philip Sidney” (IX). Garcilaso’s prime position in this pantheon was a startling innovation but one which Helgerson considered fully justified for “… Garcilaso deserves far more than the pre-eminent position he securely holds in the literary history of Spain, deserves a more fully European reputation. Together with his friend Juan Boscán, he is every bit the Spanish counterpart of Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard in France and of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser in England. Indeed he and Boscan are the forerunners of those French and English poets …” (XIII). A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, which proved fatal, compelled Helgerson to compress his larger...