Spain occupied the New World as the Spanish language was undergoing its last significant linguistic revolution and Spanish poetry its most profound and lasting change. Perhaps this coincidence explains the pervasive presence of poetry during the Conquest, as well as in the viceregal societies created as a result of colonization. In the sixteenth century, Spanish poetry was in the midst of a feverish renewal, adopting the style and spirit derived from Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance, and elevating its traditional forms, notably the romancero, to written and printed expression. At the same time as the Italianate style was being adopted, the inherited medieval poetics of the courtly cancioneros, and the ballads of the romancero, endured, proliferated, and contaminated the new poetry. Changes in poetry, as in all else in the Spanish sixteenth century, meant more often than not an uneasy coexistence of medieval and renaissance ideas and practices. The resiliency of the Medieval is one of the elements that led, in due time, to the style that characterizes colonial lyric, which is the Baroque.

But the renewal was radical enough. Perhaps the most profound change, because it affected the very rhythm of poetic language itself, and its distinction from everyday speech, was the adoption of the eleven-syllable line. The hendecasyllable became the standard for cultivated poetry, in contrast to the shorter lines used for ballads, other popular verse, and in cancionero poems, like the ones written by Hernando Colón, the Discoverer’s son (Varela, “La obra poética de Hernando Colón”).