The essays dealing with female secular love poetry appear to support Rosa Navarro's observation that within the Italianate poetic tradition there was little if any place for the female poet. The Petrarchan tradition established a male desiring subject and a female desired object: “Ella es la hermosura, no el deseo; es el objeto del canto, no el cantor” (Navarro). Female poets writing in this amorous tradition encountered another obstacle. Petrarchism had run its course by the seventeenth century, so that even male poets were hard pressed to construct the persona of a convincing “amante” in a drama of an “amor literario”: “Cuando la codificación literaria se apodera totalmente del poema, no importa el género del yo literario, da lo mismo que sea Lope o María de Zayas” (Navarro). This is why only such poetic talents as Lope, Góngora and Quevedo could surmount this difficulty.

The amorous tradition and its rhetoric, expressed through the prestigious Italianate forms, established a closed phallocratic signifying system that excluded women. Spanish female poets seem to have perceived that it would be a transgression of male letters to compose in the Italianate tradition a love poem in which a female desiring subject addresses a male desired object—or perhaps considered this as irrelevant to their concerns. When they do transgress, as do Leonor de la Cueva and Ramírez de Guzmán, they ameliorate their trespass by constructing a male speaker, by avoiding the gender issue altogether with a gender neutral speaker (which the convention assumes is male), or by addressing abstractions, such as “A los celos,” “La esperanza,” “El temor.”

Sor Violante del Cielo, however, and albeit in popular forms—romances, décimas—does subvert the amorous tradition, not by constructing a female lover addressing a male beloved, but rather by establishing a female desiring subject and a female desired object. As Amanda Powell demonstrates, such poems “traverse erotic borders of the sex–gender paradigm” and destabilize gender positions. Do these poems express female homoeroticism or is it that Petrarchism has been redirected to express female social bonding (Olivares and Boyce 1995)?

With regard to the common use among female poets of the pastoral, Navarro, commenting on Leonor de la Cueva's sonnet XI, maintains that “El yo no es, pues, el de un poema italianizante, sino el de un personaje de libro de pastores que se queja en un monólogo lírico, en un soneto.”