ABSTRACT
From her contemporaries to present-day readers, Sor Juana’s witty insights into the emotional stages of desire, devotion, jealousy, rejection, and absence have inspired admiration. Electa Arenal asserts that “her originality lies in this combination: in the literary forms she gave to her insatiable, gender-conscious, intellectual curiosity” (“Introduction” 18). The number of poems devoted to the topic of love – approximately one-fifth of her lyric poetry – is almost as impressive as their brilliance. For a secular poet this proportion would not be remarkable, but it has surprised some readers, considering the cloistered, celibate life that Sor Juana chose after five years at the viceregal court. For medieval and early modern poets, however, love and poetry were inseparable (Luciani, “Courtly Love” 183). To be a poet was to participate in the courtly practice of lyric poetry in the Petrarchan tradition, in which the speaker was cast as a male lover addressing his adulation and complaints to a silent female object whose assigned role was to reject his entreaties.
