1. The question of Boscán's knowledge of his predecessors' work has not been settled. Most recently, Armisén has argued that Boscán may have been familiar with the fifteenth-century marqués de Santillana's prose prologue, if not with his translations and imitations of Petrarch (359-62, 366). In any case, in both the letter and the poetry Boscán presents himself as the first Spanish Petrarchist.

2. Thus it is not surprising that Menéndez y Pelayo and Lapesa, both of whom cite the Knapp edition, had nothing to say about the collection as a whole, while Crawford's attempts to date specific sonnets in the collection, and to correlate them on a biographical basis with coplas from the first book, are antithetical to the notion of a macrotext and disregard the poet's own statement that he ceased writing coplas when he began writing hendecasyllabic poetry. Only Parducci, though apparently unfamiliar with the early editions, recognized that certain canciones belong with certain sonnets (35), and analyzed them as two parallel collections.

3. Even this edition confuses the issue by sequentially numbering the poems beginning with the first poem of book 1; thus, the first poem of book 2 is numbered "XXIX" (the 1543 edition had no numbering). To facilitate discussion of book 2 and also reference to the Riquer edition, from which I generally quote, I will first refer to poems by their order in book 2 and then by their number in the 1957 edition; thus, "sonnet 1 (XXIX)," etc.

4. Since 1957 there have been several studies of Boscán's poetry, all of which in some way take into account its macrotextual status. See especially Darst, Juan Boscán , who at first declares the collection a unified whole, but then separately discusses the sonnets and the canciones; Armisén, whose analysis, using Lotman's Structure of the Artistic Text as a theoretical base, is thorough; and Cruz, Imitación , who concentrates on the canciones and on intertextual connections to Petrarch and Bembo.

5. As Menéndez y Pelayo aptly put it, Boscán's sonnets are, if ingenious, metaphysical and abstract (281). Darst agrees that an "exemplificative impetus" lies behind the decision to avoid the "personal and idiosyncratic" ( Juan Boscán , 54); this feature connects Boscán to that fifteenth-century Petrarchism discussed by both Farinelli and Rico, in which love remained an abstraction and specific Petrarchan details were incorporated, as topoi , in poems written in traditional Spanish genres. But Boscán's use of hendecasyllabic sonnets and canciones and their combination into a collection gives his poetry an amplitude that differentiates him from those predecessors.

6. In other poems, of course, Petrarch presents himself writing his poetry, while Boscán also employs words such as oíd which suggest an oral status.

7. Although poets could have expressed Petrarchist love in the tradi-

tional lyric genres, those working in the older formal system were often bound by its thematic constraints as well. See for example Jones's discussions of Encina's love poetry (in The Golden Age and "Juan del Encina"); to him, the love in the traditional Spanish lyric differed from Petrarchan love in several crucial ways, and he credits this difference with Encina's imperviousness to formal Italian influences on his love lyrics, even as his dramatic and pastoral works reflect marked Italian tendencies. In passing, he remarks that Spanish literature had to wait until Boscán and Garcilaso for poets who were receptive to the Petrarchan conception of love, and this in turn facilitated their receptivity to the formal and aesthetic aspects of the Italian love lyric.

8. On similar problems in the writer-audience relationship in Petrarch, see Kennedy, 22-41.

9. Armisén comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that there are three implied "moments" in each poem—the time of the love experience, that of the poem's composition, and that of its reading (12)—but he fails to note a disjunction between the implied poet-lover and the actual poet, who has more in common with the reader. This irony, as Genot notes (40), while much more typical of narrative than of lyric poetry, is also quintessentially Petrarchan; Petrarch himself wrote of "mio primo giovenile errore, / quand' era in parte altr' uom da quel ch' i' sono" (my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now, Rime sparse , 1.3-4). On the connection between narrativity and macrotextuality see Navarrete, "Boiardo's Pastorali," 37-38.

10. See Genot: 'L' ego lirico si esprime con e nel presente, e magari con e in una successione di presenti" (The lyric I expresses itself with and in the present, and at best with and in a succession of presents, 44).

11. To Morreale, these lines are an example of Boscán's inadequate command of poetic language (275), while Armisén connects this and all his difficulties with narration to the inexpressibility topos (9-19), and Egido to a poetics of silence (97-98). Cruz also discusses the poem in terms of the preceding sonnets and of the Petrarchan paradigm, noting that the extended form of the canción allows him to amplify and invert the game in Petrarch ( Imitación , 54).

12. In spite of the opening lines, the opening stanza conjures up a desolate landscape to which the poet is exiled, repeatedly emphasizing his loneliness. This preoccupation with abstract suffering in place of concrete physical description has led critics such as Menéndez y Pelayo (286-87) and Morreale (256-60) to see in the poem a persistence of cancionero aesthetics, and indeed the subsequent stanzas reprise some of the stylistic features of cancionero poetry, including the repetition of words such as "apartarme / de quien jamás osé pensar partirme" (to separate myself from her from whom I never dared to think of separating myself; 15-16) and "conviene consolarme" (it is convenient to console myself; 18). These, however, are the types of wordplay praised by Castiglione and Valdés, and they never threaten the stylistic plainness and prosaic quality of the verse.

13. The first of these examples is a variation on the trope of the lover transformed into the beloved, one of the most canonical in fifteenth-century Petrarchism; see Rico.

14. Darst ( Juan Boscán , 66-67, 77-80) notes several of the biblical allusions in the final poems. For a close and sensitive reading of the concluding sonnets see also Armisén, 400-404.

15. Boscán's views here parallel Edmund Spenser's later Reformation-inspired notion of marriage as the truest form of chastity; see Dasenbrock, 32-84. Together with the biblical imagery, this link suggests a stronger Erasmist influence on Boscán than has hitherto been recognized.

16. The historical and aesthetic issues that preoccupy Boscán in the preface are recast, in the poetry, as a critique of the insufficiency of both the cancionero and the Petrarchan erotic codes. Though clearly a close reader of Petrarch, Boscán seems uninterested in other dimensions of the Italians poetry (the political, the Augustinian, etc.).

17. Even here Boscán's strategy is profoundly Petrarchistic; as Kennedy noted, "manipulating the rhetorical means of the Petrarchan poem is a poet in control of his craft, capable of making and handling allusions to the Classical and Christian traditions and of transforming all that he approaches into a creative moral synthesis that is at once definitive and artistic" (40).

18. These commentaries, along with that by José Nicolás de Azara (1765), are gathered by Gallego Morell in Garcilaso de la Vega y sus comentaristas , from which I cite.

19. The biographical interpretation of Garcilaso is not entirely anachronistic, however, for it has its roots in the Renaissance practice of reading Petrarch, Bembo, and other poets; see Cruz, Imitación , 26-33. For Lapesa's response to the "new biography" see his essay "Poesía y realidad."

20. Rime sparse 70 also contains individual phrases that Garcilaso may have been imitating. To Ana María Snell, one of the few critics to take Garcilaso's poem seriously, the final verse is completely in agreement with the epigrammatic and anecdotal nature of the piece, which is no more than an ingenious development of the single thought it contains; the final verse, both seed and culmination, makes the poem a literary exercise in Barthes's sense of the term. See also Levisi, who emphasizes the importance of sight in this poem and elsewhere in Garcilaso's poetry, and Gargano, 27-54.

21. For a rhetorical analysis of the agudeza see Barnard, The Myth , 128-30.

22. In this regard they anticipate the nymphs in the third eclogue, who emerge not from an ancient mythological river but from the Tajo, right outside modern Toledo. See also Mariscal, who comments that in this poem there is no isolation of the poetic from nature (118).

23. Moreover, to the degree that the nymphs and the river represent the poetic tradition, and that tears are emblematic of poetry, the poem can be read as an allegory of the dissolution of the poet's self in the face of Petrarch's text. Bembo in fact cited Rime sparse 303 as one of Petrarch's most beautiful compositions, emphasizing the sound structure and the alterna-

tion of ''feminine" vowels with "masculine" consonants, an erotic encounter thus thematicized by Garcilaso.

24. Foley sees in the levanta/cae pair a drawing-out of an antithesis, while the tercets serve as an extended gloss on the Petrarchan concept of volere (198-99, 204-5).

25. See Lázaro Carreter, "La 'Ode,'" who comments that there is a latent slyness in the poem that has never been appreciated (121).

26. Lázaro Carreter considers the contrary-to-fact clause to be an imitation of Propertius 2.1.17-26, and suggests this poem as the source for Garcilaso's allusive mythological strategy as well. He also proposes an erotic interpretation of the poem's title, with "flor" referring to Sanseverino's virginity.

27. The full implications of her anti-Narcissan flight can be glossed with a poem from the erotic tradition, sonnet 32 in the Alzieu anthology There a woman, wishing to behold her private parts, stands at the water's edge, lifts up her skirt, and thanks the reflection for the wealth it has brought her, only to fall in the water when she tries to kiss it. The woman in this sonnet, while slightly silly and even narcissistic, is proud of her sexuality and pleased with the social benefits her situation confers on her, while Camila flees from her sexually adult body and the new social role it implies.

28. Zimic comes close to this interpretation: he believes that Camila's extreme reaction is motivated by her realization of her own attraction to Albanio, and recalls how for St. John of the Cross the fountain was a symbol of love (51).

29. Indeed, the word is used in the sense of a token in Garcilaso's third canción , "mientras de mí otra prenda no tuviere" (while having no other token from me, 32), a poem that also echoes sonnet 10 in its emphasis on changed fortunes, "pues á sido en un ora / todo aquello deshecho / en que toda mi vida fue gastada" (while in an hour all has been undone, on which I had spent my entire life, 43-45). Here again the biographical critics differ: Navarro saw in these lines a reference to Garcilaso's loss of favor with the emperor, but Keniston again perceived a connection to Isabel Freire's death; see the Rivers edition, 186.

30. See Paul Julian Smith, who notes that "the María addressed (whoever she may have been) is certainly not the Isabel whose death inspires the poem as a whole and who has always been taken to be the source of the poet's inspiration" ( Writing , 53). He also sees a further contradiction in the emphasis on poetic voice in the opening stanzas, belied by the recourse to writing ( pluma ) in the subsequent ones; to him it is actually the pen, not the voice, that grants immortality. Yet even Garcilaso was not so far from the oral tradition, which effectively bequeathed immortality on Achilles and Hector in Homeric times, and on the host of heroes remembered in the romancero .

31. As Gallego Morell noted ("Estudio crítico," 23), Garcilaso's pastoralism is conventionally seen as an escape from his military undertakings; but it would be more correct to underline the paradox of this escape to nature

not from military encampments—which are in nature—but from the environment of the court and the literary academies, from the social occasions in which Italian ladies showed off their equally artificial clothes, coiffures, and wit, and from the conversations about literary themes among the writers he befriended. The bee's flight above the flower-strewn ground is farther from humanist circles than from the line of march.

32. Petrarch himself, in his canzone 70, ended the first four stanzas with a quote from a preceding Provençal or Italian poet, but then concluded the final stanza with the first line from his own canzone 23; the use of tapestries may in itself also allude to Ariosto's Orlando furioso , known as "la gran tela." On Garcilaso's relation to his models, Barnard comments, "Garcilaso's subversion of his models points to their insufficiency and achieves a secret victory over them. The result is not only a unique poetic vision but one that rivals the models in accuracy of presentation. And yet in the correction lies a poetic strategy" ("Garcilaso's Poetics," 319-20).

33. See Paterson; also Bayo, 143. More recently, Johnson has restated the effect in Freudian terms: "The notions of competition and replacement liken Garcilaso to the Oedipal son who wants to replace his father with his mother, except that Garcilaso (any poem is after all a fantasy) is successful. Furthermore, having usurped the father's role, Garcilaso now also continues in the normal function of the son: to identify with the father by imitating him and in that sense to keep him alive" (302-3).

34. There is a long tradition, summarized by Zimic, that attempts to emend "degollada" to "ygualada," i.e., stretched out, or interpreting the original word to mean exsanguinated and thus to reconcile it with Isabel Freire's death in childbirth. Zimic makes a case for a metaphorical understanding of "degollada"; stronger still is the argument that Garcilaso meant what he wrote in what is after all a fiction. See also Martínez-López; Lapesa, "Poesía y realidad."

35. See also Cruz, Imitación , 120. The notion that Garcilaso has achieved what Bloom calls a metalepsis of his predecessors is thus not a subjective aesthetic-historical assessment, but an interpretation of the poem, a restatement in Bloomean terms of how Garcilaso has written himself into literary history.