ABSTRACT
Spanish literary history is full of beautiful stories. This chapter explores the idea, the necessity really, of reading Garcilaso. The poem is written in a unique five-line strophe that Garcilaso invented for the occasion in imitation of Bernardo Tasso, who had in turn invented it in order to imitate the rhythm of the Horatian ode. A continuity of tradition is thus established, a chain that reaches from Garcilaso to B. Tasso and the Italian Renaissance to Horace and Antiquity. Garcilaso enters into a paradoxical relationship with poetic tradition and with certain poets of Antiquity: Horace and Ovid especially, with the shadow of Virgil and the unwritten epic hovering in the background. This relationship has elements of both identification and rivalry. Modern criticism has tended to play down but by no means eliminate the presence of Garcilaso and Isabel, and to speak more of the relation established in the text between art and nature, and art and art.
