Juan de la Cruz was born Juan de Yepes in 1542 at Fontiveros (Hontiveros) near Ávila. Some years after Juan's father died (1543?), his mother moved with the family to Arevalo and later to Medina del Campo. Juan attended school at the Colegio de los niños de la Doctrina between 1552 and 1556, and then he went with his patron, Don Antonio Álvarez de Toledo, to a hospital with the intention of taking holy orders. Between 1554 and 1563 Juan's education was in the hands of the Jesuits at their college in Medina. After three years' study in Salamanca, he was thinking of joining the Carthusian Order, but on meeting St Teresa he was persuaded by her to join the Discalced Reform. After a further year's study in Salamanca, Juan moved to the Reformed House at Duruelo. In 1571 he went to Alcalá de Henares as Rector of the College of the Reform, and there he directed the Carmelite nuns. From 1572 to 1577 he was confessor to the nuns at Ávila where St Teresa had established the Mother House.

In 1576 Juan was abducted by the Calced friars and imprisoned by them at Medina del Campo, but he was soon released through the intervention of the Papal Nuncio, Ormaneto. In 1577, however, he was again abducted by the Calced who held him prisoner at the Calced Carmelite priory in Toledo. It was while he was imprisoned there, suffering the most terrible deprivations and even torture, that Juan de la Cruz composed some of his finest poetry. After nine months, he escaped. From 1579 to 1582 he was Rector of the Carmelite college at Baeza; from 1582 he was Prior at Granada; in 1585 he was Prior at Segovia, the central House of the Reform, where he was badly treated by the Discalced Vicar-General, P. Doria. in 1591 the Madrid Chapter-General deprived him of his offices and at first decided to send him to Mexico. This decision was then rescinded and effectively Juan de la Cruz was banished to Ubeda in the province of Andalusia. There he died in 1591.

Such are the bare facts of saint-poet's life. What is not told by these facts is the extraordinary personality of the man: his rigourous intellect, his indomitable courage and his rare ability to understand and get on with all who encountered him, except those who were motivated by jealousy or entrenched in the power-politics of a religious order at an unsettled period in the history of the Catholic Church. On January 25, 1675, he was beatified by Clement X and canonised on December 26, 1726 by Benedict XIII. On August 2, 1926 he was declared Doctor of the Church Universal by Pius XI.

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The American poet and translator, Willis Barnstone, has written of Juan de la Cruz's 'Noche oscura': 'I think it is the most complete poem in the Spanish language'; and with 'Noche oscura' in mind, and that other great poem, 'Cántico espiritual', Gerald Brenan has no hesitation in describing Juan de la Cruz as 'one of the greatest poets of any country.' In reading 'Noche oscura', then, what we are encountering is one of the acknowledged great masterpieces of Spanish and indeed world lyric poetry.

The main problem facing the translator of Juan de la Cruz's poem is how to preserve the balance between the potential eroticism of the allegory's imagery and the mystical experience which is the poem's raison de'etre. The tendency of translators in our own age of unbelief has been to treat the poem as a love poem, albeit a sublime one. In this interpretation, the poem is presented as a descriptive evocation of sexual ecstasy. Arthur Symons' version most clearly demonstrates this reading of the poem. Here is how Symons translates the first stanza: