Content area
Full Text
Most Hispanists born in the twentieth century give pride of place, among Garcilaso's poems, to his universally appreciated eclogues. Viewing this preference from an historical perspective, one can see it first clearly reflected in José Nicolás de Azara's 1765 edition, which, unlike any previous edition of Garcilaso's poetry, begins with the eclogues. (The canonical order of poems, established by Boscán's 1543 edition and repeated in all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions, puts first the Petrarchan section of sonnets and canzoni, continues with the elegies and the epistle, and ends with the eclogues.) Azara's contemporary Blanco White, as quoted by John Dent- Young (8-9), condemned the second elegy and the epistle ("perfectly devoid of merit") and praised the first part of the third eclogue ("very beautiful"); as Dent-Young remarks, such preferences "almost certainly align him with the romanticizers who want the best poetry to be that which describes the poet's supposed real-life love for Isabel Freyre" (8-9).
Azara's reordering of Garcilaso's poems became standard for the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. Tomás Navarro Tomás adopts it in his influential edition (Vol. 3 of the "Clásicos Castellanos" series), first published in 1911 and later revised in 1924 and 1935. Hayward Keniston, in his less widely circulated and more scholarly edition of 1925, restored Boscán's canonical order. But in his companion volume of 1922, which is a critical study of the poet's life and works, he perpetuates the romantic reading of the poetry. He appreciates above all Garcilaso's tender melancholy, akin to Virgil's and Sannazaro's, in his eclogues:
It is, then, as a revelation of the poet's own experience, admirable in its sincerity and touching in its emotion, that the first of the Eclogues stands as a true poem. In an age of artificial imitation it is eminent for its depth of real feeling and its wistful tenderness. Nowhere in the works of Garcilaso, rarely in the poems of the Renaissance, can we find a song which comes closer to our hearts than this cry of the poet's heart; disappointment and death have rarely received a more moving portrayal. (Keniston, Garcilaso 244-45)
"His Petrarchan mood is less sincere," he adds (262). And he condemns the non-lyric poetry: the first elegy, whose Latin sources he studies in detail,...