Historical context

The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Spanish America witnessed the flowering of the genre of epic poetry which, like the chronicle and the Mission drama, was a literary product of the encounter between the Old World and the New. In addition to its artistic aspirations, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epic poem frequently had a pragmatic intention, in which case it would turn into a long narrative of the merits of the author or of his friends. Like the chronicle, the epic would document the conquistador’s astonishment at the wonders of the new lands. Unlike the chronicle, the epic poem would arrange its eight-line hendecasyllabic stanzas around the individual hero – Hernán Cortés, Garcí Hurtado de Mendoza, or Francisco Pizarro – or the collective hero – Araucanian Indians and Spaniards, in the work of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, Spaniards, in Juan de Castellanos. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial epic is the genre that belongs to the moment in history when Spain dominated the world and her captains embodied the ideal of the heroic knight. The survival of the genre into the eighteenth century evinced a desperate effort to keep that ideal alive.

Medieval and renaissance epic

Epic poetry was cultivated in Spain from the fifth century, beginning with the Visigothic conquest. In heroic narrative verses, anonymous authors wrote of the “pursuit of honor through adventure.” The poems were possibly the work of jongleurs who wrote at the very moment of the events they narrated. Two types developed: the heroic epic, aimed at a popular audience (Cantar de Mío Cid, Siete infantes de Lara, Poema de Fern´n González), and the literary epic (Libro de Alexandre), directed to an elite audience and inspired by Virgil. The genre began to decline in the fifteenth century (Deyermond, Historia de la literatura española, 1, 65-101).