This essay examines how in the nineteenth century, Latin American Romantic poets such as José María Heredia (Cuba, 1803-1839) and Antônio Gonçalves Dias (Brazil, 1823-1864), and modernistas such as José Martí (Cuba, 1853-1895), Rubén Darío (Nicaragua 1867-1916) and Delmira Agustini (Uruguay, 1886-1914), were shaping Latin American cultural politics through their poetry. From the Romantic poetics of exile and anticolonial discourse in Heredia and Dias to modernismo’s meta-poetic reflections and their redefinition of poetry through metaphors as the swan, this essay discusses that aesthetic and philosophical shift in Latin American nineteenth-century poetry. While Martí’s critique of the modern city is more in touch with the political and poetic questions that emerge in avant-garde art, Darío’s modernista aesthetics show his preoccupation with a cosmopolitan, “universal” vision of poetry, highly problematic in its reification of women, but not necessarily “apolitical” or completely detached from the social struggles of the era. The essay concludes analyzing how Agustini’s poetic drive and rhetorical risks take modernismo to another level, transgressing poetic and social norms that bounded women to submissive positions, and redefining the poetics of desire in Latin American poetry.