But within the romantic climate, in that ignition which invaded all the ways of the spirit and invested all ideals, moral and civil conscience was powerfully renewed and with it culture and poetry. Literary life descended from purely intellectual circles and penetrated the popular strata, stirring up collective and concrete aspirations and interpreting ethical, social and national needs that urged everyone’s conscience. Together with militant and literary journalism, dramatic and narrative poetry also became the most effective and rapid means of political propaganda and human education, as well as the expression of individual lyrical moments; the poet took the sentimental motifs from the living historical and contemporary reality, and the lyric opera searched and made palpitating d ‘ the legendary and traditional heritage of Mexico is topical. The Aztecs, the tyrants of indigenous civilization, and the first conquerors, “ferocious and cruel” adventurers, but also with an indomitable soul, now broke into poetry and theater to represent the figure of the despot and the warrior, against the background of the people Indian, idyllically naive and primitive, a symbol of meekness and sacrifice. The presence of JM Heredia, the great Cuban exile, contributed to promoting and invigorating these spiritual and intellectual energies. his patriotic and vehement lyrics; but it was I. Rodríguez Galván, who in his precocious and short youth (1816-1842) attempted drama, storytelling and lyric, the most vital and most fruitful forms. Predominantly lyrical temperament, he captured the sentimental and melodramatic aspects at the dawn of the conquest and the beginnings of independence, especially in Visión de Moctezuma, in the Profecía de Guatimoc, in the Privado del Virrey, in Muñoz visitador de México: dramatic and passionate poetry that, even in the oratory enthusiasm that covers it, knows how to find a human balance and the melancholy sweetness of sacrifice that is projected into history in the distant future. Fernando Calderón y Beltrán (1809-1845), the most popular and popular author, fertile in weaves and adaptations, was more interested in deriving themes and situations from other literatures (García Gutiérrez, Espronceda, Lamartine), rather than deepening those more properly national resources and that local color that Rodríguez Galván sensed just then with full awareness. Once penetrated, the romantic current spread rapidly, with the inevitable manner implicit in it, resulting in an abundant declamatory, verbose and abstract flowering, which time has done justice to, but which more blatantly betrayed those tribunal and rhetorical habits which even the most measured writers were not exempt from and which even then nestled in all Latin American literatures, seriously undermining the entire tradition.
According to watchtutorials, in the enthusiastic and undisciplined intoxication of the new ideals, which for the most part limited themselves to denying and disintegrating and only a few acted as a rebuilding impulse, poetry gradually lost those contacts with the more concrete spiritual content, and the same aesthetic form lost the discipline of meditation. So that the political and literary movement that was taking shape and consolidating itself as a reaction to this crisis and in the name of old ideals – civil order, moral equilibrium, restoration of religious faith, classic sense of poetry – which the innovators accused of academic and tyrannical conservatism, was instead, in some respects, a salutary corrective to the general life of the nation, and, in particular, to the intellectual life, bringing to it a broader sense of reality. José J. Pesado (1801-1861) was its leader, political and literary at the same time – which demonstrates the profound and unitary need for this new discipline, and Manuel Carpio (1791-1860), among others, was convinced of its supporters. A. Arango y Escandón (1821-1883), José Mexico Roa Barcena (1827-1908), whose activity penetrates the heart of the nineteenth century. They preserved the ties with tradition, they introduced anew the ethical, social, and above all religious elements of the past, they recalled the models of classical art, but also they were permeated by the new culture, which intended to trace their national origins and their popular essence in the more properly indigenous life, in the history prior to the conquest, in folklore and in archaic and local legends. If the Pesado translated the Bible and theJerusalem Liberata del Tasso, however, remakes Lamartine and Manzoni; and if his fantastic nature was decidedly oriented towards classical forms, he also re-elaborated, with unconscious romantic sensibility, the relics of ancient Aztec poetry, creating an interest in indigenous lyric (Los Aztecas, 1854), understood in the most absolute purity of texture and sentiment: the most fragile and most fragrant flower of Mexican literature. And so, while A. Arango was a poet on Christian and evangelical assumptions, Roa Barcena, also a collaborator of the Catholic magazine La Cruz – an organ of the conservative party -, collected the Leyendas mexicanas with a style that was between erudite and anecdotal and interpreted with acute adherence Hoffman and Byron.
