poetry

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695), or as she is better known, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and composer during the colonial period in Mexico—then called the territory of New Spain. She was fluent in Latin and Nahuatl in addition to her native Spanish. She is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the period, not merely within the Mexican or Hispanic American traditions, but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. She was forced to join a nunnery in her late teens by her own confessor and later lifelong antagonist the Bishop of Puebla. In a letter years later she would recall this, writing, “If you had known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.” The cloistered life afforded her time, access to books, and a cell of her own, and thus it became her most prolific period. The poetry she composed there would make her famous in the world well beyond the convent walls, and allow her to reel the world back into those walls, receiving many visitors and admirers and earning the protection and patronage of the viceroys of De Mancera, the archbishop viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the marquises de la Laguna de Camero Viejo. Her work has long been honored by the Mexican government, and her life and works have inspired numerous authors, composers, and filmmakers. Carlos Fuentes once called her "the first great Latin American poet." She died at age 43 of an unknown plague while caring for a sister of her religious order, shortly after writing the now-famous letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the pen name for the Bishop of Puebla.