Reflecting the turn in colonial literary scholarship towards performance in relation to sound studies, this chapter examines poetry as a form of poesis that emerged as an aural aesthetic category in colonial Mexico. Taking into consideration sociocultural factors, including language, class, and caste, and the evangelizing impetus of much religious music, this exploration of sounded lyric verse explains how these forms were not limited to church settings and places, nor to colonizing sources. The chapter considers poetry as a prestige form in music, the presentation of lyric in public musical settings, and the importance of aural aesthetics to convey poesis as a performative aesthetic category of cultural belonging. Musical poetic texts examined include the romance, villancico, church music, and other popular forms of autochthonous lyrical verse. Finally, the chapter considers the continuation of poetic aural performance through the nineteenth century.

This chapter proposes a new analysis of Mexican Romanticism, from José María Heredia to the Reforma generation. It considers how many of its canonical authors, such as Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and Ignacio Ramírez, write an important part of their production privileging the first-person plural, and thus, effectively make the collective subject central. This We should, in turn, be read in the light of their considerable political agency. This chapter argues that what defines the complex temporality particular to the Romantic poem is that both the I and the We simultaneously pose each other as presupposition. The I can only exist as a singularity that the We is unable to assimilate and thus excretes. Yet, at the same time, it is only through the outside gaze of the person who does not belong to it that a group may crystallize as a true collectivity.

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and its long aftermath, a distinguished lineage of Mexican poets that were also – and perhaps more importantly – outstandingly gifted essayists, made a sustained effort to reconstitute a national tradition fully inserted in Occidentalism. This chapter examines this great synthesis of the critical poets, beginning with Alfonso Reyes, followed by the Contemporáneos group, and arriving at the major accomplishments of Octavio Paz. The chapter focuses on Paz, establishing the different sources of his ideas on critical poetry and then examining some of his most significant compositions in this vein, with a particular focus on “Himno entre ruinas.”

This chapter discusses the question of cosmopolitanism and its role in the formation of the poetry of Modernismo, with a focus on the work of three major writers: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Amado Nervo, and José Juan Tablada. Using the notion of “strategic Occidentalism” – the deliberate and critical engagements of writers with the Western tradition – the chapter discusses the ways in which poets in the Modernismo tradition used specific literary genealogies to transition Mexican poetry into the twentieth century. The chapter also comments on the various available editions of the work of these poets.

Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

This chapter deals with another group of modernistas, mostly from the Catholic cities of Western Mexico, who are quite different from those examined in Chapter 6. Although they often met with the other group in Mexico City or shared the pages of the Revista Moderna, their approach to modernity is so different that it deserves a separate analysis. Modernismo can be defined by its able incorporation of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Parnassianism, but in the case of this group, there is a scepticism towards several aspects of these aesthetic movements, which always acts as a path that leads back to provincial life, landscape, and a national (and again Catholic) decorum. The authors studied in this chapter include Luis G. Urbina, Enrique González Martínez, Francisco González León, Manuel José Othón, and, in pride of place, Ramón López Velarde.

This chapter considers cultural institutions as major shapers of the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Here Octavio Paz is once again crucial, as a cultural broker, the editor of Plural and later Vuelta, and the force behind the creation of major cultural institutions. The roles of poetic institutions are reflected in the careers of major poets like José Emilio Pacheco and Eduardo Lizalde, among the first winners of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This award opened a poetic period that eventually slowly declined, beginning with the closing of Vuelta to what Malva Flores has termed the “twilight” of the intellectual poets. The chapter also examines the cultural ecology emerging from the subsidies, fellowships, and privileges instituted by the Mexican State.

This chapter proposes that the most enduring contribution of the ill-fated second generation of Romanticism – whose members included the suicidal Manuel Acuña and syphilitic Manuel M. Flores, to name but two – was not that they exhibited traits associated with European Romanticism. Rather, this chapter posits that they gave rise to a longue durée Romantic sensibility that lasted well into the twentieth century. Furthermore, we here argue that this important legacy belongs to mostly female authors, starting with Laura Méndez de Cuenca and María Enriqueta, who begin their successful careers in the nineteenth century. The work of these and other female authors, widely read by their contemporaries but then omitted from scholarly attention, demands examination, in particular as scholarly interest in their work intensifies.

Although the first anthology of Mexican poetry dates from 1833, Alejandro Higashi argued in his seminal volume PM-XXI-360 that the primary role of the anthology in Mexico changed in 1966. Traditionally a genre that presents a selection of previous work shaped by a certain notion of taste, the anthology took on an overtly prescriptive role with the first edition of Poesía en movimiento, edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. This text has remained in print ever since, and has privileged a practice of “demanding poetry” that has been taken up by later anthologies. The chapter also discusses the “cloning lab” of the anthology and how this phenomenon can be discerned in the profusion of anthologies published since the 1980s.

In the same way as the popular returns to poetic discourses, as studied in Chapter 14, so does the Baroque – an aesthetic which, as Bolívar Echeverría has taught us, is not a passing phase, but rather one of modernity’s faces. In this chapter, a panoply of authors – some of them included in the seminal Medusario anthology, some of them readers of it – are considered in the light of the Neobaroque and postpoetry. The authors discussed include Gerardo Deniz, David Huerta, Coral Bracho, Myriam Moscona, Luis Felipe Fabre, Ricardo Cázares, and Alejandro Tarrab.

This chapter is devoted to the long poem which, after failed attempts to create an epic of the new nation, was reconceived in the twentieth century in the lyrical vein and remains a crucial consecratory instance in the Mexican canon. The chapter examines the nature and weight of the long poem’s trajectory, including the Contemporáneo José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939), work by Octavio Paz, and Sara Uribe’s Antigona González (2012). The discussion also considers the new forms of the long poem, such as those by David Huerta, Maricela Guerrero, Isabel Zapata, Balam Rodrigo, Ricardo Cázares, and others.

This chapter marks out an arc of poetic productions in originary languages, starting in the colonial period with materials compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and following with productions in Nahuatl penned by Sor Juana. The chapter moves into the nineteenth century with the interventions of Faustino Chimalpopoca, and the attempts to “update” Nahua poetry by José Joaquín Pesado. A critical assessment of the role played by scholars such as Ángel María Garibay and his student Miguel León Portilla during the twentieth century leads into readings of contemporary poets who write in Indigenous languages. Women poets of this genre, such as Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda, are of particular interest.

This comprehensive review of Chicanx poetry considers the lyric poetry of Greater Mexico as an ongoing evolution of and conversation with varied poetic traditions at the crossroads of geopolitical, cultural, and expressive exchange. This chapter addresses this arc, beginning with oral forms such as the corrido, and examines the ascendency of poetry in the early borderlands press, which was anchored by colonial New Spanish lyric poetry. The focus then turns to the flourishinging of Chicano/a/x poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s via the establishment of Chicano/a/x publication outlets and independent printing presses as well as through Chicano/a/x-specific literary prizes. The chapter concludes by considering the form’s coevolution with Chicano/a/x identity and politics to the present day, including a return to oral forms such as slam poetry, and its evolving relationship with other Latino/a/x cultural productions.

This chapter is devoted to the forms of public activation of poetry. Such poetic performances comprise the spectacular (and heavily attended) mode of public performance that marked the success of Modernista poet Amado Nervo, and, later, the declamaciones by Berta Singerman. The decline of this type of dramatic performance was followed by more intimate poetic activations that can be traced through the recordings of collections such as Voz Viva de México. Even this sotto voce reading – in which the music of the verse plays a central role –has been challenged more recently by poets attuned to spoken word and poetry slam practices, and who have garnered considerable and well-deserved attention, among them Rojo Córdova, José Eugenio Sánchez, and Rocío Cerón.

This chapter is focused on the work of contemporary Mexican poets, both those writing from Mexico and those who reside in the United States, and how their distinctive works challenge the Mexican tradition. These encounters include the undoing of the idea of poetic knowledge and upending the idea of poetry by engaging with various transnational traditions. Mexican poets writing in English – among them Wendy Treviño, Mónica de la Torre, and Rodrigo Toscano – undo the language-based idea of Mexican poetry. The chapter also discusses expatriate Mexican poets whose works remain in tension with national traditions, such as Dolores Dorantes, Manuel Iris, and Román Luján.

The roots of Mexican poetry wend out from many traditions. Indigenous epic and lyric poetry survive in early modern works that simultaneously preserved and overwrote them. They subtly informed the practice of Mexican poetry in subsequent centuries and reemerged in full voice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Diverse poetic practices stemming from both popular and learned traditions were introduced by Spaniards into Mexico over three centuries of viceregal rule in New Spain. European languages, ranging from classical to vernacular, brought their respective forms and traditions to the Mexican poetic radix: Latin and Greek; Italian and then – centrally – French; and later English, with the stems of Portuguese and German traditions grafted on.