SOURCE: "The Poetry of Sor Juana," in Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz, Twayne, 1971, pp. 82-98.

In the following essay, Flynn provides a stylistic and thematic overview of Cruz's poetry.

Sor Juana was in effect a poet laureate who had to write many poems for the important occasions of Church and State. For the Church she wrote a series of villancicos celebrating certain feast days of the year. Most of them were to be combined with the prayers of matins, and a few were to be sung at the Epistle, the Offertory, and the Ite missa est of the Mass.

Those villancicos that were written as "complete sets for matins" were broken up into three nocturnes matching the three parts of matins. The first nocturne had the task of introducing the mystery of the feast day or the history of the saint whose memory was being celebrated...