This article proposes the study of a corpus of twelve relaciones de sucesos of disasters in romance from a rhetorical-poetic perspective. Through a wide range of the texts considered, analysed in their essential components (exordium,narratio, argumentatio and epilogus), the aim is to define the thematic, formal and structural rules leading the blinded copleros and the poets of the popular poetry in the composition of these informative and persuasive texts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.