| Love and its attendant passions has been the | | | | Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, |
| favorite subject of Spanish poetry since the | | | | Nicaragua, Peru, The Philippines, Puerto |
| time of the troubadours, medieval poets who | | | | Rico, The United States, Uruguay and |
| earned their keep by singing for the people | | | | Venezuela which were written in Spanish but |
| at the village square or for the nobility | | | | whose authors were not from Spain. All these |
| during royal gatherings at the palace. | | | | poets and their respective poems have |
| Composers in their own right, these court | | | | contributed in some way to the development of |
| poets sang about courtly love and the | | | | Spanish Poetry as a genre because they all |
| bittersweet pain of unattained love for an | | | | wrote their work in Spanish albeit in the |
| idealized woman using the jarchas, a form of | | | | form of Spanish common to their country of |
| love song that was actually poetry written in | | | | origin. Although some of them wrote patriotic |
| very short stanzas.It is important in the | | | | poems about their motherland, most of them |
| study of Spanish love poems to differentiate | | | | utilized images of love to depict the sorrow |
| between poems that originated from countries | | | | of a country that has lost its freedom. |
| outside of Spain including Argentina, Chile, | | | | |