Love and its attendant passions has been the favorite subject of Spanish poetry since the time of the troubadours, medieval poets who earned their keep by singing for the people at the village square or for the nobility during royal gatherings at the palace. Composers in their own right, these court poets sang about courtly love and the bittersweet pain of unattained love for an idealized woman using the jarchas, a form of love song that was actually poetry written in very short stanzas.
It is important in the study of Spanish love poems to differentiate between poems that originated from countries outside of Spain including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, The United States, Uruguay and Venezuela which were written in Spanish but whose authors were not from Spain. All these poets and their respective poems have contributed in some way to the development of Spanish Poetry as a genre because they all wrote their work in Spanish albeit in the form of Spanish common to their country of origin. Although some of them wrote patriotic poems about their motherland, most of them utilized images of love to depict the sorrow of a country that has lost its freedom.
Some of these well-known Spanish poets and their popular poems are:
Carlos Alberto Garcia – Amor
Que soy
Quisiera
Yo te conozco
Olvidarte
Nestor Oscar Morris – Quiero decirte algo
Pienso solo en ti
Jorge E. Diaz Leyton – Tu
Manuel M. Mendez – Pertenencia
Focusing attention on Spanish poets who trace their origins to Spain, however; poets who lived, loved and wrote their best work within the Spanish Peninsula or the so-called ‘Poetas de España’, we come up with a list of illustrious writers whose works contributed to the development of Spanish Literature as it is today.
* Rafael Alberti - La Amante
* Vicente Aleixandre ( Nobel Laureate 1977) – Destruction of Love
* Dámaso Alonso – Hijos de la Ira
* Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer – Rimas y leyendas
* Saint John of the Cross - Dark Night of the Soul
* Luis Cernuda - La realidad y el deseo
* Francisco Domene - Arrabalías
* León Felipe – Drop a Star
* Federico García Lorca - Sonetos del amor oscuro
* Luis de Góngora - Soledades
* Jorge Guillén - Cántico
* Miguel Hernández - Nanas de cebolla
* Santa Teresa de Jesús - Laughter Came From Every Brick
* Juan Ramón Jiménez (Nobel Laureate 1956) – La Poetica
* Antonio Machado - Nuevas canciones
* Jorge Manrique - Coplas por la muerte de su padre
* Emilio Prados - Veinte poemas en verso
* Francisco de Quevedo - Flores de poetas ilustres
* Ana Rossetti – Where is My Man
* Pedro Salinas - Ayer Te Besé en los Labios
* Garcilaso de la Vega - Hora de Nuestra Señora
* Lope de Vega - La Arcadia
* Esteban Manuel de Villegas - Las Eróticas
* Leopoldo María Panero – Dedicatoria