The Epic of Florida brings to light a neglected tradition of colonial poetry from the sixteenth century. Written in response to dramatic encounters on the peninsula—Ponce de León’s landfall in 1513, the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, and ongoing conflicts among European empires and Native peoples—these works capture how early modern writers transformed violent and uncertain events into epic verse.
This classroom-ready volume presents three substantial poems: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegy to Ponce de León, Bartolomé de Flores’s Memoir of the Happy Result, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo’s La Florida. Each text is introduced with clear headnotes and annotations, and a critical introduction situates la Florida within the broader imperial, cultural, and religious context of the Spanish Golden Age. Comparative “galleries” offer additional sources to help students understand how early poets interpreted exploration, conquest, and missionary encounters.
By recovering this overlooked corpus, The Epic of Florida reframes colonial American literature as a multilingual, transatlantic project that predates the United States. The volume makes long and difficult poems accessible and engaging for classroom use, while opening new directions for research. It is ideal for courses in world literature, American and Latin American studies, and colonial history and will also interest Latin Americanists, scholars of Spanish and US literature, and general readers drawn to the early cultural history of Florida.
About the Author :
Thomas Hallock is Professor of English and Florida studies at the University of South Florida. He has been researching, writing about, and teaching the early literature of la Florida for thirty years. Hallock’s previous books include From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral; A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst; and Happy Neighborhood: Essays and Poems.
Review :
“The epics of Florida, carefully translated and contextualized by Thomas Hallock, reveal hard truths: the story of this country is entangled in Spanish imperialism, the multilingual trajectory of American literature has yet to be accounted for, and ultimately refined Renaissance poetry is an integral part of the founding violence of what is today the United States.”
—Luis Fernando Restrepo, author of Un nuevo reino imaginado: Las Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias de Juan de Castellanos
