Few Spanish poets have been what might be termed professional poets. Lorca, perhaps the best-known of all, is untypical in being as near to a full-time writer as one could envisage. Even the jobbing poet of the Middle Ages – the minstrel – is denied a place of honour in Spanish literature given the dearth of surviving epic poems and the likely learned authorship of the Poema de mío Cid. The Middle Ages do, however, provide some of the classic profiles of Spanish poets, notably the figure of the poet-cleric. The contrasting figures of Berceo and the Archpriest of Hita established a trend that was to continue into the Golden Age whereby clerics wrote secular as well as religious poetry. Thus the major figures of the Golden Age include the love poet Fernando de Herrera (1534–97), the holder of a small lay benefice in the church of San Andrés in Seville; Góngora, who entered the Church in order to accept a prebend renounced in his favour by an uncle; and as the theologian Fray Luis de León (1527–91); and the Carmelite mystic, San Juan de la Cruz (1542–91).

The figure of the poet-courtier, that would be a dominant presence at the start of the seventeenth century in such figures as the Conde de Salinas (1564–1630) and the Conde de Villamediana (1582–1622), is anticipated by such aristocratic poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458) and Juan de Mena (1411–56).