The silencing of the last major poet of the seventeenth century might seem a natural, if melodramatic, endpoint for the book I have been trying to write. Nevertheless, literary periods are seldom as clear-cut as their historians would have us believe, and Sor Juana's own poetic achievement should warn us against easy generalizations. However much one allows for cultural differences, this achievement is clearly the work of a writer for whom the complementary tendencies of culteranismo and conceptismo are still a natural means of expression, a medium through which she is still able to exercise the full range of her intelligence. The contrast with the general mediocrity of late seventeenth-century peninsular verse could hardly be more striking: here, as we have seen, everything seems to point to the decline of a once major tradition which is no longer capable of prolonging itself. Whether or not this was inevitable is another question: given the increasing isolation of Spain from European culture and intellectual life, one might be inclined to think that it was. Yet, as against this, the example of Sor Juana suggets that, granted sufficient talent, it was still possible to build on this same tradition which might otherwise have seemed to be reaching exhaustion.

Clearly, then, there is no easy equation between the quality of seventeenth-century poetry and the fortunes of the country itself: though both Góngora and Quevedo suffered personally through social failure or political manoeuvering, the greatness of their poetic achievement remains unaffected; conversely, Philip IV and Olivares, for all their political shortcomings, were genuinely cultured people whose role as patrons of the arts was both decisive and beneficial.