Selected Poems

Perhaps the greatest of Spain's Renaissance poets, Fernando de Herrera (1534-97), a native of Seville, was the writer who took on board the experiments with Italian forms carried out by his predecessors Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega (whose work he edited and annotated), and made of them a native style. As it was with many other poets elsewhere-such as Sir Thomas Wyatt in England-the example of Petrarch, both directly, and as mediated by Garcilaso, was crucial in the development of Herrera's elegant vernacular verse in Spanish. With Garcilaso, Boscán and Herrera, Spanish poetry takes wing. The generation that followed Herrera was to be the greatest literary flowering in Spanish history.