Introduction

In the prologue to Eclogue III, Garcilaso addresses the tension between the demands of his professional life as a soldier and his poetic vocation:

These verses suggest a close relationship between two potentially conflictive realms of experience, arms and letters; one in which parity of value is the implicit ideal. There is, as Navarrete has indicated, a strategy of self-fashioning at work here which allows Garcilaso to write himself into literary history as ‘the courtier poet who healed the theoretical split’ between the two. However, as Anne J. Cruz has pointed out, Garcilaso never actually attained in his life, nor expressed through his poetry, the equilibrium between these two categories which has been attributed to him by early modern and modern critics alike.

Moreover, it is misleading to see reconciliation of an arms versus letters opposition as a major preoccupation of Garcilaso's poetry. Rather, it is a distinctive strand in a more broadly conceptualised dialectic, where tension derives from the fraught interaction of the macrocosm with the smaller world of the resisting, sentient individual. This is true, in differing ways, of Sonnets X, XXIII, XXIX and XXXIII.