Literary Contributions of Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

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Two Poets, both laymen, stand out like brilliant stars on Mexico’s firmament, shedding the luster of the faith they loyally professed on the land they loved with equal loyalty, unfolding for Mexico’s glory the wealth of their poetic genius at a time when the storm clouds were gathering visibly and days of gloom and sorrow lowered over the Church and the faith to which their native land owed so much of her high and enviable culture. The two laymen in question are Manuel Carpio, who died in 1860, and José Joaquín Pesado, whose death occurred a year later. It is generally granted that Carpio and Pesado will always be cited in the history of Mexican literature as the leading revivers and exponents of classicism in their native land, without breaking away completely from the more popular and appealing forms of romanticism. It may be said that, as classicists, Carpio and Pesado took up and brought to fruition the movement begun by Martinez de Navarette and Sánchez de Tagle a half century earlier.