The great mystics had discovered this principle in themselves, as creators of their own life. The poetics of Spain Teresa de Jesús and Spain Juan de la Cruz is nothing but the ardor of love itself, which moves the virtue of art as an instrument. The active mysticism of the saint and the ascetic voluntarism of her experience are energetically stopped in the Vida, in the Castillo interior and in the Camino de Perfección and they testify to the progressive constitution and tireless improvement of a personality, which operates in the world feeling its life projected into the eternal. The prose of St. Teresa, frank and lean, with movements of ideas and spurts of will, is that of a creature who is internal to her own soul, and operates in a sphere of action where relations with men and women things are lived in the love of God. She is the saint of action and her will is only of conquest. Of purely contemplative ardor, which resolves the doctrine in the splendor of flashing images, is instead the lyricism of Juan de la Cruz, all raptures, ecstasies and miracles. His Canciones spirituales, where the illuminating ardor sinks into the dark night of the soul, they rise to spiritual heights that transcend the language of common experience. The biblical attitudes, assumed by the Song of Songs, become the lyric of a soul, of which it is necessary to penetrate the intimate life, to listen with emotion to its interior music and song. The transcendence of the “secret wisdom” and sacred of infused contemplation constitutes the doctrinal element of his mysticism. This unfolds in imaginative and glowing forms and is gathered on the junction of two extremes (todo y nada): human annihilation as a condition of divine superabundance and the death of meaning as a condition of supreme life (Subida del Carmelo). Through the passive night of the spirit, in the atmosphere of the superhuman, a divinely pure light passes through the soul and absorbs it in its absolute darkness. It is love that transforms it, making it capable of penetrating all things and even the depths of God (Noche escura del alma). In the lyric of art the Spanish Renaissance has its typical representatives in Luis de León and in Fernando de Herrera. Augustinian the first, creates the type of poetic prose, modeling it on the dialogues of Plato, which Luis Vives considered pure poetry. The content of Los nombres de Cristo it is Platonic-Augustinian and focuses on the true happiness that every soul devoted to good can achieve. The work, which has not yet been understood in its true ontological meaning, can be traced back to the forms of metaphysical knowledge. The names of Christ are similes: and they refer to the same constitutive of the divine essence which is communicated as participation in the created intellect; who understands it, not in himself, but by virtue of his own created essence, without detracting from what still transcends it. Poetic prose are still La perfecta casada, which connects with the De institutione feminae christianae del Vives, and the Exposición del libro de Job ; but very high poems are those few original lyrics that Luis de León left behind, as the perfection of an art that has assimilated the classical form of Horace and Virgil. A love beats inside you that contemplates the world with a spirit of charity and recognizes it harmonized by a supreme order (A Salinas, La noche serena, A Felipe Ruiz, etc.), whose rhythm is felt by the poet vibrating in his own heart. It is an art that assimilates every moral content, whether it comes from Horace or Petrarch or the Bible. In the transparency of a perfect form, this art is in Francisco de la Torre the conquest of a poet who overcomes Petrarchism and adapts to classical expression with a personal content of sensitivity and grace. This balance of content and form is already beginning to fail in Herrera. On a surge of inspiration tinged with melancholy, and whose religious aspect is the desire for a beauty that subsists in itself, doctrinal and decorative elements surmount in his lyric. It is wrong to make of Herrera a Platonist who attempts a reconciliation with Aristotelian theories in aesthetics. Undoubtedly his warm and imaginative language lends itself badly to extracting notes of clear speculative value; but the beauty of which he thinks is by no means an ideal and immutable type which man discovers by vision of ideas. For him, beauty is the profound splendor of a soul that transpires in a graceful body: of a soul that is the principle of life and animating force. And this is the “form” that remains etched in the memory and ignites desire and transforms the beloved into the lover. Herrera’s Petrarchism is entirely external and accidental. It does not touch the aesthetic enthusiasm of a poet, who sometimes knows how to reabsorb in himself classical elements of Horace and biblical elements in a form of grandiose and sonorous eloquence (To Juan de Austria). Herrera sets a noble and passionate poetic language, far from prose, subtended in logical constructions and rich in intellectual elements, to “procurar con el entendimiento modos nuevos y llenos de hermosura”. His poetry is in the Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso, and there we can already glimpse the lyric developments of the golden age. Around these typical representatives of the Spanish Renaissance the ranks of lyricists gather, reworking Platonic-Augustinian motifs in Horatian forms of metrics and art (Francisco de Figueroa, Francisco de Medrano, Baltasar del Alcázar), now with immediate expressive happiness of agile stanzas a quinarî and settenarî (Jerónimo Bermúdez), now with subtle engraving and formal research (Juan de Arguijo, Pablo de Céspedes, Francisco Pacheco).
