Origins and developments

Any historical survey of Spanish poetry will be confronted with the problem of origins. Only those histories that understand Spanish poetry as the poetry of Spain rather than poetry in the Spanish language have a clear point of departure: Martial and Lucan, poets of Roman Spain. If, however, we think of the distant sources of the traditional popular poetry that was written down from the Middle Ages then we might acknowledge that a kind of song may well have been in existence since the later Paleolithic period (30,000–15,000 BC), and thus contemporary with cave art, some of the finest examples of which are in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. To compound the problem, even the earliest written poetry in Ibero-Romance is by no means a clear-cut issue. The discovery in the mid twentieth century of poetic fragments written in Mozarabic, a Romance dialect employed by those Hispano-Romans who remained in Andalusia after the Moorish invasion of the Peninsula at the start of the eighth century, proved to be one of the most important developments in the literary history of the Middle Ages. According to those scholars responsible for this pioneering investigation, from around the tenth century poets of Al-Andalus (the name given to the Moorish lands of the south of Spain) wrote compositions entitled muwashashas in Classical Arabic, and later Hebrew, that contained a final section in Vulgar Arabic or Mozarabic. This tailpiece was called the kharja (literally ‘going away’).