A lasting divorce, this of a romantic politics and a classic literature. When letters were invaded by romanticism, with its lyric lamentations, a sane realism--the realism of men preoccupied with finances or laborious codifications--struggled against the swamping waves of all this rhetoric. Literary forms, long out of fashion in France and even in Spain, still aroused enthusiasm in America; the American author adopted the realism of the naturalistic novel when the French schools were already given over to symbolism, and at a later date he became first {250} a modernist and then a decadent, while in France a classic restoration had set in. To the real current of European literature South America has preferred ephemeral excesses, and the work of coteries, which she has imitated with enthusiasm. It is barely ten years since South American letters began to reflect--curiously behind the times--the direction taken by French poetry. The literature of the new continent, to-day invaded by books and ideas, follows a path parallel to that followed by French and Spanish letters. Every novelty finds an echo, and the very diversity of imitation ought before long to give rise to a final originality. Poets, both romantic and classic, threw themselves into the social conflicts of the time; whence that kinship between poetry and eloquence, already recognised by Brunetière in France.[1] In American poetry we find the civic accent, eulogies of liberty, odes to civilisation and the mother-country, rather than elegies or "states of soul." Tyrtæus would be popular there rather than Anacreon; Béranger would be imitated rather than De Musset. Classicism thus takes the form of a civic poetry; calm and mannered, it sings of political subjects, of progress, independence, and the victories of liberty over theocracy. In Mexico, Ecuador, and the Argentine, the first generation of republican poets were incontestably disciples of the master of the Spanish masters--Quintana, whose grave and virile odes exalted the printing-press, philanthropy, and progress: new deities erected by the French Revolution upon the ancient altars. His emphasis, the movement of his verse, and the breath of oratory which enlivens his stanzas, charmed and subjugated the writers oversea. Liberty, so barely conquered, gave birth to a poetry {251} which sang of heroes and of battles. Ideas and forms were inspired by Quintana; their best eulogy is comparison with their model. Thus Olmedo, the second poet of this classic age, is known as the American Quintana. Those who acclaimed the Revolution in Mexico also were disciples of the Spanish poet; republican orators in verse, Quintana Roo or Sanchez del Tagle, who describe the heroes of the War of Independence. An eminent poetess, Salome Ureña de Henriquez, of San Domingo, sang of civilisation and the native land with a most austere and noble eloquence.