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 Boscán, Garcilaso was one of the great pion...