Fernando de Herrera is one of the leading figures in the first School of Sevilla (Seville), a group of sixteenth-century Spanish neoclassic poets and humanists who are concerned with rhetoric and the form of language.

Herrera, although never ordained, he had taken took minor orders and been appointed to a benefice in Sevilla.

The income from this position has allowed him to spend his life studying and writing.

His aristocratic literary ideas had been clearly set forth in his Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso de la Vega (1580; “Notes on the Works of Garcilaso de la Vega”), which had praised the Italianate innovations of the poet Garcilaso de la Vega and several other poets of Sevilla.

In his own poetry, published as Algunas obras de Fernando de Herrera (1582; “Some Works of Fernando de Herrera”), he elaborates on the style of Garcilaso and begins to move toward culteranismo (an ornate and affected poetic style that flourishes in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally develops, in its most extreme form, into gongorismo).

Although his love lyrics addressed to Luz, the countess of Gelves, are popular in his day, his most enduring poems are his patriotic odes, rich in Old Testament rhetoric and melodious eclogues.

He had also composed a history, Relación de la guerra de Chipre y batalla naval de Lepanto (1572; “Account of the War of Cyprus and the Naval Battle of Lepanto”).