Covering Mexican literary history from pre-Columbian literature to the twenty-first-century, including works from Greater Mexico, this book is the most comprehensive study on Mexican poetry available in English. It examines key authors, such as Bernando de Balbuena, Juana de Asbaje, Ramón López Velarde, José Gorostiza, and Octavio Paz, and considers how they should be read today. Individual chapters focus on important movements, poetic forms, and topics, such as epics, lyric poetry, romanticism, modernism, poetry and performance, poetry in indigenous languages, Mexican American and Chicanx poetry, and the relationship between Mexican literature and gender. This book provides a global understanding of Mexican poetry, its institutions and its main authors for students and scholars in any discipline connected to the subject.

‘‘A History of Mexican Poetry’ should be required reading for instructors, researchers, and students of Mexican cultural studies. It is a field-altering text that affirms the value of diverse and long-ignored artists and mediums while offering new ways to look at those poets already anointed as canon. As such, and by virtue of the scholarly authority of its editors and contributors, the book has the potential to reshape the canon of Mexican poetry, favoring renewal over ossification. It is a fine example of how we might read Mexican poetry (and approach all art, more generally); with more open minds and hearts we can grasp its roots and more fully appreciate the beauty of its flowering.’

Daniel Cooper Source: Modern Philology