Spanish · 1501–1536
Garcilaso was a Toledan nobleman and a soldier of Charles V who went with the emperor everywhere: Rhodes, Tunis, Provence. In Granada in 1526 he met the Portuguese lady-in-waiting Isabel Freyre, who married someone else and died in childbirth, and who is the woman behind almost everything he wrote. Banished to an island in the Danube for attending a marriage the emperor disapproved of, he spent time in Naples among Italian humanists and came back with the hendecasyllable, the sonnet, the eclogue and the terza rima. He wrote around forty poems in all. In 1536, at thirty-five, he led an assault on a tower near Fréjus without a helmet, was hit by a stone, and died in Nice. His friend Juan Boscán's widow published the poems in 1543, and within a generation Spanish verse had been permanently rebuilt on his model.