ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some most significant directions pursued by critics in their quest to illuminate the poem's most controversial or intricate passages. Scholars have used five thematic and theoretical approaches to analyze the poem in the past few decades: Sor Juana's imitation of Gongora; scientific, philosophical and emblematic models; feminism; theology; and contemporary philosophical poems vis-a-vis Primero Sueno. Sor Juana's imitation of Gongora has been the most accepted critical premise about Primero sueno. The Primero sueno is a philosophical poem is indisputable, but scholars differ in locating it in the shift from concepts of mind and cosmic design framed by orthodox Christian theology to those based in secular epistemological models of modernity. This author's El sueño manierista de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz provides an overview of approaches to Primero sueno in the process of explaining the distinction between the intellectual, unresolved dualisms of Mannerism and the spontaneous, impulsive, dramatic character of the Baroque, whose figure is the circle.
