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Description of  A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe

In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderfully suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535 from the neighborhood of ruined Carthage in North Africa, Richard Helgerson examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Along with his friend Juan Boscn, Garcilaso was one of the great pioneers of that poetry, radically reforming Spanish verse in imitation of modern Italian and ancient Roman models. As the century progressed, similar projects were undertaken in France by Ronsard and du Bellay, in Portugal by Cames, and in England by Sidney and Spenser. And wherever the new poetry emerged, it was prompted by a sense that imperial ambitionthe quest to be in the present what Rome had been in the pastrequired a vernacular poetry comparable to the poetry of Rome. Read more