The love sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz belong to the long and varied tradition of love poetry in the Western World, which goes back at least to Greek literature, when the militant, masculine poetry of Homer gave way to the feminine sensibility of Sappho. As the first great love poet of Greece, she developed a voice that was totally different from that of Homer, a voice that was personal and introspective, focused on intimate emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, even at times anguished and associated with pathological symptoms. In her poetry woman occupies the center of the stage and cultivates the typically Western individual personality, subtly analyzing a great variety of affective states. Anacreon, another archetypal but masculine love poet in Greece, was entirely different, singing the pleasures of wine, sex, and music.

Catullus, the first great love poet to write in Latin, renewed the Sapphic tradition, synthesizing emotional conflicts in his epigrams, such as this one, for example: "Odi et amo …," "I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask me why: / I don't know, but I feel it, and it keeps me in agony". This typical epigram, anticipating some of Sor Juana's sonnets, consists of a single elegiac distich, that is, of a metrically asymmetric pair of lines, the first being an hexameter and the second a pentameter. The elegy, or lament, written in a series of such distichs, was the best-known genre of love poetry in Latin; besides Catullus, love elegies were written by Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Ausonius, and other poets. In elegiac distichs Ovid wrote a whole series of poems that were well-known during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; among them are the Heroides—the laments of women betrayed by their lovers—, the Ars amatoria or art of love, and the Remedia amoris or remedies for love.

With the rebirth of vernacular poetry in the Christian Middle Ages, especially in twelfth-century France, there developed another historic dichotomy between epic poetry, or chansons de geste, recited orally by men and for men, especially warriors, and the songs of the troubadours, which we now call courtly love poetry, written and sung by men for great ladies and lords in the Provençal courts. This poetry, although still influenced by the Ovidian tradition, marks the foundation of a new concept and code of aristocratic love; according to this code, which was highly conventional and stylized, the masculine lover, generally imagined as an unmarried youth without great power of his own, was supposed to exalt and adore an unnamed married lady, the Provençal dons, who during the absences of her husband was the all-powerful mistress of court and castle, and was endowed by the poet with supreme physical beauty and insuperable moral virtues. This self-abasing and passionate literary devotion imposed upon the poet-lover a feudal discipline that supposedly ennobled him; he learned to delight in the suffering caused by the unbridgeable distance between himself and his lady. According to the code, it was the frustration of desire that lay at the root of the poet's song. In addition to Ovidian and feudal influences, there are obvious religious parallels between courtly love and the glorification of the crucified Christ's humble suffering (gloria crucis et passionis), as well as the Gothic cult of the Virgin Mary, the source of all beauty and divine grace. From the south of France, the troubadours traveled from court to court, taking with them to Germany, England, Portugal, Catalonia, Italy and even Sicily their songs of courtly love; in this way, the vernaculars of each region gradually adopted this poetic code and formed local schools of love poetry.

It was in the Sicilian school that a court notary, Giacomo da Lentino, invented in the thirteenth century a new "little song", or "sonetto", fourteen lines long, divided into an octet and a sestet with different rhymes: this was the birth of the love sonnet, an invention that soon achieved success in northern Italy with Dante's youthful sonnets addressed to Beatrice. Then, in the fourteenth century, Petrarch spent part of his long life creating and perfecting his own canzoniere devoted to Laura. This collection of songs and sonnets is an artistic combination of poems in which the poet expresses and analyzes minutely each state of mind and each stage in the story of his passionate spiritual development. Petrarch's canzoniere became the most influential body of love poetry during the vernacular Renaissance; Petrarchism became in the sixteenth century an important literary movement, not only in Italy but also in Spain and the other countries of Europe.

The first Spanish sonnets, which are probably the first sonnets written outside of Italy, belong to the fifteenth century, when at long last there had developed in Castile a school of courtly love; the Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458) translated and imitated in Spanish some of the more spiritual love sonnets by Dante and Petrarch. But Santillana's sonnets were not widely circulated. The history of the Spanish sonnet begins in effect with the publication, in 1543, of the poetry written by Juan de Boscán and by Garcilaso de la Vega; the triumph of the Spanish hendecasyllabic line, which is the iambic pentameter, brought with it the sonnet, which immediately achieved a prestige that it has maintained until the present throughout the Hispanic world.

The Spanish love sonnet began as a close imitation of its Italian and Petrarchan models in rhyme-schemes and structure, syntactic, semantic, and thematic; for two centuries the Spanish and the Italian sonnet developed side by side, influencing one another mutually. The basic argument of the love sonnet combines the conventions of courtly love with Classical and mythological motifs, but the themes vary widely, from those of religious spiritualism and of refined human love to the grossest pornographic parodies. In his commentaries on Garcilaso's sonnets Fernando de Herrera established the relation between the witty concision of the sonnet and that of the Latin epigram. Baroque poets, with their characteristic wit, further complicated the paradoxical, antithetical, and contradictory aspects of previous Spanish poetry; Sor Juana participates fully in this tendency.

Petrarch's Canzoniere or Rime sparse, consisting principally of sonnets and canzoni, is arranged to form a poetic chronology based on a love for a real woman (Laura), which was a more or less imaginary experience; it is divided into two sections, "in vita" and "in morte", before and after Laura's death. Boscán's cancionero, made up of ten canciones and 92 sonnets, clearly imitates Petrarch's collection in its binary chronological structure, but the division is quite original: there is an abrupt transition from a traditional courtly love affair, filled with sinful erotic anguish, to a chaste love within matrimonial bliss. Garcilaso's approximately thirty love sonnets, on the other hand, are not integrated with his five canciones, nor do they form a coherent whole; they are individual sonnets, more or less Petrarchan in tone, and frequently mythologically pictorial. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Fernando de Herrera constructed a cancionero following closely the Petrarchan model, but Garcilaso's loose sequence of individual sonnets was the model that predominated in Spain and her colonies.

Sor Juana, in the history of Hispanic poetry, was clearly the last great poet in the tradition that had begun in Spanish with Boscán and Garcilaso and that came to an end with her death on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, in New Spain, as Mexico was then known. Although she was well acquainted with the Petrarchan tradition, reflected in her poetry, her love sonnets do not form a canzoniere. We may group her sonnets by the persons to whom they are addressed, but when we consider her sonnets as a whole, we find that they are addressed to many different persons, and although they do not constitute a love story, they do reflect her social and personal relations with a number of other people.

Sor Juana was thoroughly familiar with the sonnets written by the great poets of Europe, and by minor poets both in Spain and in the colonies. Her poetry echoes the traditions of New Spain; in her literary world she was the poet who commanded the widest range of previous poetry. She was of course conversant with the Renaissance practice of imitatio, which in her case was never servile. She adapted to her own purposes a wide range of models from different sources, addressing a public that ranged from the clerical writer, the aristocratic courtier, and the learned scientist to the more modest world of musicians and poets involved with cathedral carol sequences and street recitations. Her world of poetry was international, according to Eugenio de Salazar's Epístola a Herrera, ranging from the "mil riquezas" of Spain and "las lindezas" of Italy to the poetry of Provence and of Greece. In New Spain there had lived sonneteers from Seville, such as Gutierre de Cetina and Juan de la Cueva, local poets such as Francisco de Terrazas, Francisco Bramón, Miguel de Guevara, as well as others from Spain who had become fully adapted to the criollo world: Bernardo de Balbuena, Fernán González de Eslava, and the bishop of Puebla and viceroy Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. Later there were other Mexican-born sonneteers such as Catalina de Eslava (the author of a sole surviving sonnet on the death of her uncle), María de Estrada, and Sor Juana's contemporary Diego de Ribera. Such poets as Luis de Sandoval Zapata, for example, had written sonnets shortly before Sor Juana did. Thus we see that her local poetic environment, which directly influenced her sonnets, was a rich one. The diversity of themes, motifs, and voices which she appropriates as a poet give evidence of this whole literary world as transformed by a learned Mexican-born writer, conscious of her unique role as an intellectual woman. She tells us in her Respuesta that she could not help being a writer; she wrote many different sorts of sonnet, seeking recognition, within her convent and outside, of her right to be a writer.

Before beginning to analyze Sor Juana's sonnets, we should emphasize one of their most unusual aspects: the fact that the poetic self who speaks is in her case not masculine but feminine. The courtly love tradition, including Petrarch, had always been based on the premise of a poet-lover who was male and adored his lady. But Sor Juana inverts or varies this established norm, speaking in different voices: the poetic self is sometimes feminine and addresses a male beloved; it is sometimes masculine and tells his lady of his suffering; it is sometimes ambiguous, of unidentifiable gender; and occasionally, whether male or female, it simply reflects upon a love situation.

Turning now to the study of Sor Juana's love sonnets, we may note that she normally follows the tradition of posing a problem in the octet and, after the usual pause or transition, of resolving the problem in the sestet. But sometimes the posing of the problem continues into the tercets, as is frequent in Baroque sonnets, and the resolution or reversal comes only in the final lines. Taking into account the whole category of Sor Juana's love sonnets, a category that is not always easily defined, with their different semantic postures, we may divide them into two large groups: in the first (A) we find the traditional, orthodox concepts of courtly or Petrarchan love organized from the personal point of view of the poet-lover; in the second (B) heterodox group, we find a parodical or burlesque point of view, which is perhaps more characteristic of Sor Juana's Baroque art.

Group A. Orthodox Concepts of Love

Within this group, two sonnets belong to a sub-group that we may call (1) "Mutual undying love" (numbers 169 and 183 in, Obras completas edited by Méndez Plancarte, 1951). Fabio, the vocative addressed by the poet's voice in number 169, is the poet's favorite masculine name, always applied to the ideal beloved. In sonnet 169 we find a process of logical reasoning that is typical of Sor Juana:

In this sonnet, the voice of a woman, as the feminine grammatical agreement indicates, addresses a man with the classical pronoun "tú." The poet in the octet describes what normally occurs: beautiful women want to be adored by many men, for to be a "deity" does not depend on a woman's beauty in itself but on the number of her worshippers, of the sacrificial victims heaped on her altar. But in the sestet the poet declares that she is much more moderate ("medida") in her pretensions, because her attention cannot be focused on so many different objects, and she only wants to be loved by the one that "collects a return (réditos) from his investment," in other words, a man that she can repay with love. In the epigrammatic sententia of the last two lines, the poet sums up her attitude: love is like salt, the lack or the excess of which ruins the taste of a dish. The images of the octet belong to the exalted level of religious worship; those of the sestet bring us down to earth with the language of commerce and kitchen recipes.

Sonnet 183 is addressed to Celia, and the voice of the poet is presumably masculine, although in this case it is not confirmed by any grammatical agreement. This difficult sonnet is based on an elaborate simile, or allegory, involving scholastic modes of thought concerning the superiority of form to matter.

Para explicar la causa a la rebeldía, ya sea firmeza de un cuidado, se vale de opinión que atribuye a la perfección de su forma lo incorruptible en la materia de los cielos; usa cuidadosamente términos de Escuelas.

The octet provides a scholastic explanation for the incorruptibility of heavenly bodies; in the sestet the persistence of love, a "vínculo terrible" which cannot be broken, is presented in comparable terms, incorruptible not because of the appetite of matter, or the body, but because of the permanence of the form, or the soul. By implication, then, love is immortal, like the stars.

This sonnet by Sor Juana presents, in an oblique way, a defense of woman's intellectual rights. In other poems she overtly uses a masculine voice; but in this sonnet her voice does not declare explicitly whether it belongs to a male or to a female. She knew that scholastic philosophy in her world was the intellectual property of men, not women, and perhaps she did not want to challenge this openly; but her own feminine authorship of the sonnet was, of course, no secret.

Let us now read a sonnet (number 182) from another sub-group that we have called (2) "Rational love"; it was written by Sor Juana in reply to a sonnet by an admirer, and in it she uses the same rhymes that he had used. We can see from this exchange not only the high cultural level of social communication surrounding the famous poet-nun in the City of Mexico but also this society's delight in literary games, pure poetic fantasy and fiction. Sor Juana wrote other sonnets with predetermined rhymes; this sonnet is related to number 181, beginning "Dices que no te acuerdas, Clori, y mientes." It is obvious that the person who sent her his sonnet was a reader of her sonnets and that she knew him; this indicates that Sor Juana's poetic manuscripts circulated within a network of her readers, that they commented to one another on her poems, and that they even dared to intervene directly by sending her poems and requests, as in this case. Her responding sonnet that we shall now see is, of all her sonnets with predetermined rhymes, the only one that we can consider as belonging to our group of "orthodox" sonnets:

The reasoning of this sonnet—spoken by a feminine voice and addressed to a "tú", and belonging to the poet's own category of "rational love"—is based on the merits or graces observed in a person; that is, this is not a case of capricious love, the love "por antojo" of line 1. The reasoning is based on the words "conocer", "ingenio", and "entendimiento": the understanding must be capable of recognizing the good qualities of the person in order to love him; otherwise it would be a case of "improporciones" that would make us realize the lover's lack of reason. This is an example of Sor Juana's emphasis on the importance of one's mental capacities. As usual, there is a rational transition from octet to sestet, leading to the poet's conclusion.

In her décimas that begin "Al amor, cualquier curioso" (number 104), Sor Juana explains what she means by "rational love", which she contrasts with a love based on "amor imperioso," or pure emotions, deriving from the influence of a star or destiny. She tells us that the love that she calls rational is based on free choice and has different names, depending on the relationship between the persons:

Y así, aunque no mude efectos,
que muda nombres es llano:
al de objeto soberano
llaman amor racional,
y al de deudos, natural,
y si es amistad, urbano.

She goes on to say, in the same poem, that only a love based on choice deserves gratitude because it is based on understanding, that is a recognition of the virtues and graces of the beloved, which is quite different from the "imperious" love that forces itself upon us and does violence to our heart in an irrational way. Sor Juana concludes in the last two lines of these décimas that one can give one's whole heart only in rational love, a love based on the understanding, which reinforces its faith with logic and reason. We should recall that in Sor Juana's play Los empenos de una casa, Leonor's love is based on Carlos's merits, and that he is faithful despite appearances that might make him doubt Leonor's love: he is courteous, kind, and well-balanced, and their love is mutual.

We find similar ideas in poem number 99, beginning "Dime, vencedor rapaz", in which the understanding and the will struggle against "inclinacion" and refuse to give in; or if the will does give in, reason resists. In poem number 5, "Si el desamor o el enojo", we also find the topic of love based on merits: "Si de tus méritos nace / esta pasión que me aflige, / ¿cómo el efecto podrá / cesar, si la causa existe?" (vv. 45-48); in number 100 ("Cogióme sin prevenci1ón") these ideas are compared to the fall of Troy. Our sonnet apparently is opposed to the topic that we may call "to see is to love", or love at first sight, found in her poems dealing with courtly love.

Sub-group 3. The Power of Fantasy

The sonnet that we will now read is one of Sor Juana's most famous (number 165), and justly so:

In this sonnet the poet overtly adopts the feminine voice (with the usual pronouns "yo / tú"). The key words used in the first quatrain ("sombra", "imagen", "ilusión", "ficción") have Latin roots and are based on Aristotelian concepts dealing with the mind, which the poet uses at the same time to address her beloved. In the second quatrain the virtues of the beloved become a magnet that attract her breast, enclosing her heart, which responds as a piece of steel, conveying the idea of armor against the attacks of love, quite different from the soft wax ("cera") used by Garcilaso de la Vega in one of his sonnets. The idea of his virtues as a magnet that attracts her is related to what we have seen in her "rational love": he has sufficient merits to be loved, but he does not love her in return. We discover the reason for the opening imperative "detente" when we reach the reproachful question of the final two lines of the second quatrain: why do you make me fall in love with you if you then run away from me? His flight explains why she has had recourse to complex mental concepts. The feminine voice of the poet, aware of her beloved's deceitful game, decides in the sestet to teach him a lesson: your tyrannical treatment, she says, cannot triumph over me, for, although you attempt to flee me, my "fantasía" can hold you fast, in spite of yourself. She is triumphant because of her mental possession of the beloved's image. Note that the "forma fantástica" that runs away from her arms is already a product of her imagination; being fantastic, his form can be captured by her mind. My inner self, she tells him, imprisons you, and this establishes a close relationship between the sentiments of love and the faculties of the mind.

This sonnet, highly intellectual and at the same time highly lyrical, can be compared, in the attitude that it expresses, with the Carta Atenagórica and the "Carta de Monterrey"; it is one more expression of Sor Juana's intellectual self-confidence, of her faith in the triumph of mind over matter. The mind is so powerful that it can destroy prisons as well as create them; as she says in poem 42, which seems to anticipate this sonnet:

Among the many excellent examples of related topics in previous authors that Méndez Plancarte cites in his notes, the following seem particularly appropriate: Martín de la Plaza's "Amante sombra de mi bien esquivo" (already noted by Abreu); Quevedo's "A fugitivas sombras doy abrazos / … / Búrlame y de burlarme corre ufana"; Calderón's "Adorando estoy tu sombra, / y, a mis ojos aparente, / por burlar mi fantasía / abracé al aire mil veces" and his "Detente, espera, / sombra, ilusion …"

These concepts, drawn from Aristotelian psychology, were a common patrimony; Sor Juana uses them in a splendid sonnet, adding as a personal note the great power of the mind; her originality lies in the fact that she centers the action within her self, a woman in love, and not in the beloved who flees and who, in the final analysis, cannot escape her mind.

There are two other poems by Sor Juana, a group of décimas (number 101) and a glosa (number 142), in which she deals with similar ideas in connection with the theme of absence. The lover, by means of thought, never leaves the beloved, no matter how far away he may be; she says that she will have "siempre el pensamiento en ti, / siempre a ti en el pensamiento". She converts the philosophical ideas of our sonnet into an almost religious love, when she says "Acá en el alma veré / el centra de mis cuidados / con los ojos de mi fe: / que gustos imaginados, / también un ciego los ve". But our sonnet is poetically superior to these two poems.

We should not forget that Sor Juana's Sueño contains some of the same topics that we find in the sonnet, including the word "imán", in connection with the lungs that attract air; more important, there is a passage in which the Pharos of Alexandria is compared with the faculty of Phantasia. The stomach, says the poet,

al cerebro envïaba
húmedos, mas tan claros, los vapores
de los atemperados cuatro humores,
que con ellos no sólo no empañaba
los simulacros que la estimativa
dio a la imaginativa
y aquésta, por custodia más segura,
en forma ya más pura
entregó a la memoria que, oficiosa,
grabó tenaz y guarda cuidadosa,
sino que daban a la Fantasía
lugar de que formase imágenes diversas …

In both the sonnet and the Sueño, Phantasia—capitalized as a personified character—mediates between thought and the sensations received by the five physical senses, as the "common sense" that combines them. In the sonnet, Phantasia forms the image of the beloved and has it retained by Memory. This faculty of the human mind plays a leading role in our sonnet; once again Sor Juana converts scientific terms into love poetry.

Group B. Heterodox Ideas about Love

What we have called Sor Juana's heterodox sonnets can also be divided into several sub-groups. In all of them Sor Juana deviates from the orthodoxy of courtly and Petrarchan love; she gives us a love that adapts to circumstances and even ignores the beloved if that seems best.

Sub-group 1. Love and hate

Two sonnets fall within this category. The first is Méndez Plancarte's number 176:

The topic is a familiar one, dating from Martial, Catullus, and Ovid, which might be called "an in-between love": one can live neither with nor without the beloved. Castillejo summed it up in the sixteenth century: "Ni contigo ni sin ti / mis penas tienen remedio, / contigo porque me matas / y sin ti, porque me muero"; the fourth line, found in the courtly love tradition, is familiar to us from the religious version of Santa Teresa. In this sonnet the gender of the speaker and of the addressee cannot be identified; s/he speaks of the special pain of this guarded sort of love, which seeks a way to relieve its suspicions and jealousy by getting even, but which cannot expect to receive more than it gives. This sonnet, while elaborately witty, has some of the charm of spontaneously colloquial language. As is normal, the question is posed in the octet and resolved in the sestet: the final line seems to mark the finale of the love affair.

The "no sé qué" of line 3, implying ineffability, derives from Petrarch; there are examples of the use of this phrase in Boscán and in St. John of the Cross, among others. Our poet, however, gives it a lighter turn by converting it into a "sí sé qué" in the following line, implying that there is a real cause to believe in the beloved's infidelity; this would justify forgetting the beloved, hardening the lover's heart. The word "fuerza" implies that this love is predestined by the stars, the sort of love that Sor Juana elsewhere rejects as irrational; true love, according to her, would be based on reason and mutual appreciation. The poet, who as a woman believes in equal obligation on both sides, concludes on a note of recrimination and perhaps final separation. It is as though, throughout the sonnet, the speaker had been thinking over the whole situation and considering different options, while at the same time talking to the addressee; the poem seems to present us with thought being overheard.

The second sonnet in this sub-group reads as follows:

Un celoso refiere el común pesar que todos padecen, y advierte a la causa [the "causa" is the person who causes the problem] el fin que puede tener la luch a de afectos encontrados.

This is once more the same love problem that we saw in the previous sonnet, but with no apparent ambiguity; the theme dates back at least to the distich ("Odi et amo …") by Ovid that we saw earlier in this essay. The conflict of opposing emotions takes place within a single person, the "speaker" of the sonnet, who plays the role of a man addressing a woman: he begins by asserting his love, but gradually he moves from doubt to doubt. At first he does not know whether to prefer, or put in first place, love or hate, since neither one reigns supreme. In the sestet he moves toward undeceiving the lady: his love may well descend to the nadir of non-love, making room for hate to take over.

Sub-group 2: Love's Temporality

We have already seen that love may change, but the two sonnets belonging to this sub-group focus directly upon time itself. The first one that we will analyze is Méndez Plancarte's number 174:

Aunque en vano, quiere reducir a método racional el pesar de un celoso.

The voice of the poet in this case is that of a disinterested adviser; it addresses Alcino (a conventional pastoral name) and tries to reason with him about his love for and jealousy of Celia. In the first quatrain it tells Alcino that his yielding to jealousy is a failure of right-thinking and causes him to act with mad fury; in the second the voice of the poet tries to reason with him, and to cause him to reason, by using rhetorical questions. The second question clearly means that Love does not have the power to guarantee anyone the eternal possession of the beloved. In the sestet the problem is resolved: human beings are subject to time, and so are all their affairs, including love; to wish it were otherwise is to ignore the nature of things. Not to understand this is not to realize that Love, like the wheel of Fortune, can only confer temporary usufruct, not permanent property rights. This use of legal concepts and a mercantile process of sensible reasoning urge Alcino in effect to be practical, not idealistic, about love.

Jealousy is not a Petrarchan theme, and Sor Juana treats it negatively, even though in one poem she admits it may be considered a sign of love. Love's temporality, or mortality, is not a Petrarchan theme either: for the orthodox Petrarchan, love is eternal and not subject to the laws of human life. The motifs or topoi that were most used in Golden Age poetry to exemplify or emblematize temporality and the wasting away of feminine beauty were the images of ancient ruins and of the rose; Sor Juana does not use the image of ruins but she does devote three sonnets to the rose, the passing of time and feminine beauty. These three poems, however, are not specifically love sonnets.

As a final example of love's temporality, let us look at the second sonnet belonging to this sub-group:

Que consuela a un celoso, epilogando la serie de los amores.

We see at once that this sonnet is closely related to the previous one: the human characters have the same names and play the same roles, and the poet continues to be an arbiter, calling upon Alcino to reflect realistically on his situation. In addition, this sonnet's quatrains belong to a tradition of poetic definitions of love; the definition in this case consists of a process that moves from uneasiness ("desasosiego") and concern ("solicitud") to the grievances and jealousy that extinguish, with their tears, the flames of love. Following the break that comes after the generalizing octet, the sestet is applied to the special case of Celia and Alcino. The first line of the sestet sums up the process of love: like everything else in life, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Then the poet asks Alcino why he should resent Celia's decision to leave him, for all she has done is to bring the process to its natural end: women, like men, have the right to stop loving.

…..

The masochistic suffering of courtly love took different forms in different poets and periods, from the theological spiritualization of Dante to the humanistic introspection of Petrarch to the burlesque indecency of unprintable sonnets. The love sonnet, with its medieval roots, was the most widely known poetic genre, and one of the most prestigious, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In studying Sor Juana's love sonnets we should always keep in mind that Renaissance and Baroque poetry has little to do with the cult of sincerity and autobiographical directness that became popular during the Romantic period, which cultivated a sensibility much closer to our own. From the simple objective idealism of the neo-Platonic Renaissance we move to the complex, disillusioned subjectivism—dynamic and Protean—of the Counter-Reformational Baroque period. Reality can no longer be trusted; Sor Juana's many voices do not give us accounts of personal experiences, which come to the surface only as remembered fantasies. In our case, these fantasies take concrete form as sonnets, with strict formal rules; they are often poetic games invented to amaze and astound. Baroque poetry, to which we attribute such complex and interrelated tendencies as both "conceptismo" and "culteranismo", reflects a perplexed and tortured world-view, according to Maravall, and a need to exercise and cultivate the mind during a difficult cultural crisis; Gracián urges the intellectual to be highly attentive and on guard, so as to be able to decipher the traumatic events that take place, events that cause one to doubt the evidence of one's own senses. Baroque wit thrives on contradictions.

In this study we have separated Sor Juana's love sonnets into two major groups. We have called the first group orthodox or idealistic; it evokes a pure, disinterested, and permanent love, or a rational love based on the merits of the beloved. The second group is heterodox in the sense that love is seen as problematic and relativistic, mixed with hate, aware of its own impermanence.

The most noteworthy fact is that Sor Juana is a woman who reinvents love poetry from a feminine perspective; she knows the established tradition, but she finds herself immersed in the disquieting Baroque world that we have described. She sometimes assumes the traditional male voice of the courtly love tradition; sometimes she applies to love her knowledge of scholastic science to characterize it as incorruptible and based on reason. In her more unorthodox phases, we hear the same voices—masculine, feminine, or ambiguous—insisting now on love as subject to time and to change, as subject to practical decisions based on the human understanding. Her language, though complex, reflects at times lovers' contact with the everyday world.

In her sonnets we can see that, from within her cloister, Sor Juana took a leading role in the cultural life of New Spain; she exchanged with the outside world not only sonnets but other manuscripts and probably books. Her poetry reflects this cultural world and shows pride in her personal knowledge of intellectual trends, both scholastic and more recent. But it also allows us to see her social role as a female arbiter and adviser in a real world of courtly gossip and family intrigue, of flirtation and changing relations among aristocrats born in Spain or in the New World; she taught lessons to others on how to react in the face of amorous deception, how to break off a sentimental engagement, why one should reject an unworthy beloved and recognize love's time-bound nature. As is shown in the case of the Enigmas that Sor Juana wrote for a group of Portuguese nuns who knew they could find in her poetry the answers to her riddles, she was widely known for her mental agility and respected for her writings, which had a strong influence on people even before they were printed.

As for the unique poem that stands out amidst all of her sonnets, "Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo", which has been called "the masterkey to her love poetry," it is a compendium of the poet's own literary and personal characteristics, among which we will point out again the following two. First, she emphasizes the inner life of the mind, analyzed here in terms of Aristotelian psychology: she reviews the process by which memory stores the "sombras", illusions and fictions that have been caught by the senses and converted into the "imagen del hechizo que más quiero", becoming in this way imprisoned by fantasy in her mind, from which there is no escape. And, second, she emphasizes the feminine perspective: in this sonnet she ignores the will of the male beloved and acts with a profoundly and daringly "feminist" determination. This sonnet reflects not only her pride as an intellectual woman capable of analyzing the mind with an erudition acquired by her own independent studies, but also her ability as a plain and simple woman to find a way to escape the "tyranny" of a fleeing lover and win the upper hand over him.

Sor Juana's intellectual and literary creativity takes advantage of a long, rich tradition to rise to new poetic heights as she analyzes with great sophistication the sentimental relationships between people belonging to her world of New Spain; she knew this world well, she was thoroughly familiar with the literary tradition dealing with questions of love, and she had a powerful human intuition that took poetry to levels that cannot be excelled.