Sor Juana's ensuing fame and success were condemned by her clerical peers and superiors. It was the Countess who carried Sor Juana's first manuscript back to Madrid and commissioned its publication in 1689. Sor Juana's richest and fullest years of productivity occurred between 16, during the patronage of the Countess of Paredes, María Luisa de Lara y Gonzaga, the most significant figure in Sor Juana's life. But Sor Juana's scope was much larger: in her work one witnesses the metamorphosis of the poetry of New Spain into the poetry of Mexico." (Peden/Stavans xxxii) Two are in veral are in the Spanish dialect of the African slaves, one partly in Portuguese, one partly in Basque." (Rappaport 13) In his introduction to Sor Juana's selected writings, Ilan Stavans noted, "Dependent as it was on Europe, the criollo intelligentsia of seventeenth century New Spain denigrated indigenous folklore. Her villancicos-religious hymns-reflect "the multilingual vernacular of colonial Mexico. Significantly, Sor Juana was among the first to experiment with Nahuatl ballads, known as tocotines, traditional Indian-style dance songs. For a time, she enjoyed the freedom to compose poems and plays on a variety of religious and non-religious subjects. It is the subject of her most important poem, " First Dream" ( Primero sueño), a poem unique in the history of Spanish poetry for the intensity of its intellectual passion.Īlthough she achieved prominence as a woman of extraordinary wit and intellect during her youth, serving in the court of the Imperial City of Mexico, almost all of her major writing was done after taking the veil. Finding herself oppressed and limited by a society in which girls were allowed only minimal literacy, and consumed by a thirst for knowledge that superceded all other needs in her life, Sor Juana was almost entirely self-taught. As if it were not enough to be a colonial female of humble origins in a seventeenth century Catholic empire, her nebulous, itinerant father was not married to her mother. The poet and translator, Willis Barnstone, observed, "Curiously, the last high moment of poetry of the Spanish Golden Age was found in the first poetic figure of the New World." (Barnstone 84). With the publication, in Madrid, of her first two collections in 16, the Golden Age of Spanish literature, which had declined by the early 1600's, was revived and extended to the year 1700, when, five years after her death, Sor Juana's third and last collection appeared in print. The astonishing range of Sor Juana's body of work includes sonnets, hymns, romances, narratives, comedies, farces, religious plays, essays and letters. During her lifetime, Sor Juana's works were distributed, read, and admired throughout the Spanish Empire, from Lima, Quito, Central America, and Mexico, to the Indies, the Philippines, and the Iberian peninsula. With the publication of her first book, Sor Juana was also dubbed Musa decima, "Tenth Muse," an epithet of praise originally applied to Sappho and shared by Sor Juana's New England contemporary, Anne Bradstreet. Because her works rose like a flame from the ashes of religious disapproval, the embattled writer came to be identified with the magical bird of myth, the Phoenix. Or (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz is universally regarded as the first major poet of the Americas and the intellectual mother of Mexico. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Mexican Phoenix
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