To whom does the produced belong? Baroque, empire and poetry according to Sor Juana

Abstract

With Francesco Petrarca's Canzoniere (or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) the relationship between poet, poetry and readers changes remarkably, not only (or not so much) in terms -thematic and polemical- of the “theory of lyric” in process but in terms of how this theory is incorporated to the “practice of lyric”: how the poet makes poetry with his theoretical conditions, thus affecting the criteria and reading settings available. This, among other things, and thanks to the “Petrarquism” , reaches in America and in the poetry of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-1695) a form and development very precise and distinctive (given, also, the colonial conditions that determined the relation itself) that will found one of the characteristics not only typical of the Baroque (its reflexive referentiality) but of the mexican poet’s (her public figure). In this sense, this essay proposes to analyze said shift (historic-theoretical) in sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetry considering, in particular, two opening poems of his printed work; and, through it, speculate about the uneven consequences that said shift meant for the critics and literature in Latinamerica.