My first idea for a book on the lines of the present one came at the end of the 1960s. In 1967, 1 had completed what professed to be a critical anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poetry – now long since, alas, out of print – which aimed at presenting something of the range, as well as the quality, of the best verse of the period, along with a brief account of Renaissance poetics and its impact in Spain. Like most anthologies, mine had its limitations: the decision to print only complete poems meant excluding a number of important longer works, and one whole genre – the literary epic – had to be omitted altogether. The next step, therefore, seemed to be a book which would make good such omissions and at the same time allow more space for discussing actual poems. Two considerations, in particular, gave conviction to the project: one was the awareness that most university students of Spanish, because of the limited nature of academic courses, were seldom encouraged to go beyond the work of a few major poets and so could have little idea of the richness of the period as a whole; the other was the wish to provide readers of other poetry of the time – English, French, Italian – with an accessible and reasonably detailed account of the corresponding Spanish poetry – in other words, to bring Spanish poetry, for all its distinctiveness, a little closer to the general European context.

Though neither of these concerns has lost its urgency, the book which has finally emerged differs from my original conception in several ways.