In his 1942 prologue to a study of San Juan de la Cruz, Dámaso Alonso confessed to feeling “terror” at the prospect of approaching the works of the great Carmelite mystic. Not only would the critic have to face the formidable problems presented by the textual maze of San Juan's poetry and its myriad literary and doctrinal sources, he would have to confront the problem of the mutual relationship between poetry and mystical experience (18). The title of his book, La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (desde esta ladera), gives a clear indication of how Alonso sought to avoid this thorny problem. He elaborates, “Voy a considerar [la poesía de San Juan] como un fenómeno literario normal: con antecedentes y con una eficacia que del lado humano requiere explicación” (20). Several years later Jorge Guillén, in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard, similarly sought to approach San Juan's poetry “desde esta ladera”: “In order to feel and understand these texts purely as poems, we must approach them directly, not as if they were anonymous, but still disregarding for the moment the supplementary information available about them, such as the historical circumstances of their origin and their transcendental interpretation” (80). Guillén went further, proclaiming allegory and poetry inherently incompatible: “The poems, when they are read as poems—and that is what they are—signify nothing but love, the intoxication of love, and their terms of reference are invariably human. No other ‘poetic’ horizon is perceptible. […] Poetry and allegory are developed along parallel lines which, if each is held to its definition, cannot interfere with or obstruct one another” (Guillén 89). For this mid-century poet-critic, San Juan's power as a poet derived in large part from his unusual “success in keeping his poetry almost completely uncontaminated by allegory” (110).

Despite some poststructuralist attempts to rehabilitate allegory, the critical distaste for allegorical poetry persists. It should not be surprising, therefore, that until recently the allegorical poems of San Juan's literary daughters have attracted little attention. The boom in scholarship on monastic women's writing inaugurated by the publication in 1989 of Untold Sisters, edited by Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, has indeed stimulated the fundamental work of textual recovery, but in comparison with monastic women's life-writing, religious poetry remains marginalized if not neglected.