Presents more than two hundred poems by sixteen Spanish and Latin American poets from the Renaissance and baroque periods and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Spanish and in English translations by noted poets.

Essays on Spanish writers of the sixteenth-century, a period of territorial expansion, political hegemony and cultural prosperity in the face of ideological repression. Discusses the Hapsburg dynasty, the impact of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition had on censorship and literary production, and the Spanish passion for the theater that increased during the 1600s, during the pinnacle of the Golden Age of drama.