Poetry was part of the common sound space, ranging from grand odes to heroes to popular songs about bandits or gauchos. The recitation of a poem, often composed solely for the occasion, accompanied most public events, and later in the century learning to recite poetry well was considered part of a good education. Poems from the ancient Spanish romancero were alive and well then in Spanish America, as Portuguese traditional poetry was in Brazil. Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda is the brightest star in the nineteenth century's female poetic firmament and, until the appearance of Ruben Dario in the 1880s, is perhaps only rivaled in the lyric by her earlier compatriot, Jose Maria de Heredia. With the expansion of public education, especially the normalista movement in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and other countries, young people, both men and women, from modest beginnings entered the literary sphere.

In the prologue to Oasis de Arte, a travel chronicle by the Peruvian writer Zoila Aurora Caceres, Ruben Dario confesses having little fondness for women of letters. Dario's fixation on the general unattractiveness of the woman of letters reappears in a chronicle entitled 'Estas mujeres'. Dario's writings on female authorship reaffirm the doctrine of the spheres that female writers aimed to subvert through their intellectual activism. Although Latin American women writers of the nineteenth century wrote biographical profiles on colleagues of the other sex with the tacit goal of inserting themselves into the masculine networks that excluded them, the inverse was much less common. In Recuerdos de Espana, Ricardo Palma, a key figure of transatlantic culture, writes of the way in which the bonds of literary fraternity tighten when under threat of gendered diversification. Ricardo Palma's desire to neutralize an identity chaos in which men are feminized and women are masculinized reproduces Dario's distinction between domestic and abnormal female writers.