Remedia amoris? Love and the Problem of Excess in the Poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyses Garcilaso’s dissent from Petrarchan norms and rejection of emotional excess. It sees Garcilaso’s engagement with metriopatheia and the mean as a literary strategy designed to signal his dissent from previous traditions, particularly in Petrarchan and pastoral poetry; and it argues that a significant strand of his poetic corpus is animated not by advocacy of emotional moderacy, but by the narrator’s struggle to enact it. After outlining Garcilaso’s broader tendency towards emulative imitation and dissent from convention, and the view of Petrarchan or elegiac love as an emotional extreme to which metriopatheia is a key response, the chapter examines three areas of Garcilaso’s poetry. In the sonnets, several narrators attempt ‘remedies’ for the lover’s excess; but those sonnets’ poetic interest lies in their dramatization of the narrators’ struggle to enact potentially viable, ‘moderate’ cures. The Second Elegy is Garcilaso’s most explicit engagement with the mean, and has been read as an attack on its viability; instead, this poem really again dramatizes the narrator’s struggle, misapplying the legitimate logic of metriopatheia and the mean because his own perceptions are distorted as a figure of extremes. The centrepiece of the chapter is a re-reading of Garcilaso’s most substantial poem, the Second Eclogue, as this struggle to cure excessive, elegiac love is the key to the poem’s relationship with a specific imitative tradition encompassing Theocritus, Virgil, and Sannazaro. That tradition of the pastoral pharmakon/medicina defines Garcilaso’s poem, and allows the long-controversial generic shift from pastoral to epic/panegyric to be newly explained.