Garcilaso de la Vega towers above the sixteenth century in Spain. Probably no Spanish poet before or since has made or left such a lasting contribution to his art. He showed his contemporaries and successors how to write sonnets; he introduced the verse epistle, he created the lira as a vehicle for the Classical ode, and he made the pastoral eclogue the prime poetic form for the remainder of the century. In addition, through his choice of a mixture of hendecasyllabic and heptasyllabic verses in the First Eclogue he laid the ground for the development of the silva in the following century, while his introduction of the octava real in the Third Eclogue paved the way for the mythological fable, the favourite long poem of the seventeenth century. His consecration in Fernando de Herrera’s Obras de Garci Lasso de la Vega con anotaciones of 1580 turned him overnight into Spain’s foremost ‘classical’ poet, ‘el príncipe de los poetas españoles’, as Herrera accurately depicted him. By 1580 he had become the poet and model to imitate and, for the boldest, the one to try to emulate. It would not, however, be until Garcilaso’s greatest successor Luis de Góngora began writing his two ‘revolutionary’ poems, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades, at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, that a true successor to Garcilaso would be found.

In his three Eclogues Garcilaso had bequeathed to the sixteenth century a model for writing pastoral verse: the setting, the characters, the themes, the language. He had also shown his contemporaries not only how to incorporate the Classical pastoral poets – Theocritus and Virgil – into modern verse, but how to make them, at the same time, modern, up-to-date. If Virgil could situate his eclogues in a contemporary, for his audience, Italian setting on the banks of the River Po, then Garcilaso could situate his in an equally contemporary setting for his public: the River Tagus as it flows around Toledo, albeit a Tagus inhabited by unlikely river nymphs. A succession of Spanish and, particularly, Portuguese poets would build upon Garcilaso’s innovations and explore the limits of the pastoral as a verse form: Sá de Miranda, Luis de Camões, Jorge de Montemayor, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Figueroa, Hernando de Acuña, Pedro Laínez, Gil Polo, and many others.