The Epic of Florida

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.