The previous passage is from Book 6 of the once famous, and quite extensive, Poética [Poetics] by the Ibero-Spanish poet and playwright Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. In it, Martínez lays out, in rhyming verse, the “general rules” of writing poetry in each of its most important modes. When it came out in 1843, the Poética quickly became a manual of sorts for many an ambitious poet in the Spanish-speaking world. The Mexican Rodríguez y Cos was no exception. As Rodríguez himself demurely mentions in the first note to El Anáhuac, his monumental poetical project is formally determined by the Spaniard’s grandiloquent guidelines: “…no he puesto en completo olvido algunos de los preceptos de los que habla Martínez de la Rosa…” […I have not completely forsaken some of the precepts of which Rodríguez de la Rosa speaks…] (El Anáhuac, p. 461). This means that, even though the Mexican poet writes of “aquello que incumbe á los hechos gloriosos, ó á la opulencia de los aztecas, y á las crueldades de los conquistadores” [that which concerns the glorious deeds or the opulence of the Aztecs, and the cruelty of the Conquistadors] in and for Mexico, he still turns to Spain as “La madre Patria,” or the Motherland, in order to try to find a place for himself, through lofty writing, in the long-standing tradition of Hispanophone poetry.

Born in Tulancingo, a city in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, Rodríguez y Cos was a prolific playwright, poet, teacher, and translator who often devoted his literary endeavours to the discussion and fictionalisation of weighty historical events, mainly those having to do with Mexico’s indigenous past. Very much in thematic tune with México conquistada [México Conquered], a 1798 epic penned by Spain’s Juan de Escóiquiz (1747–1820), El Anáhuac tells of the heroic resistance of Cuahutimótzin—the last historical Aztec emperor, or tlatoani—against the tyrannical rule of his predecessor, Mocteuczoma, and his impending surrender to the Spanish invaders, who in the epic are mostly portrayed as ruthless, power-hungry raiders. “Anahuac,” meaning “land near the water,” is the ancestral Nahua name for the Valley of Mexico, a plateau in the central region of the country, where modern-day Mexico City now sprawls. It is there that Rodríguez y Cos’s versified tale of adventure, glory, and war between the Old and the New World unfolds through high-resounding hendecasyllables, which favour assonance over the more conventional full rhymes of traditional Spanish heroic poetry.

Attempting to follow in the steps of Homer, Virgil, and Tasso as he presents “aquellos acentos dulcísimos de los grandes ingenious” [the sweetest notes of the great geniuses] (El Anáhuac, p. 1), Rodríguez y Cos undertakes an essay-like rifacimento of his poetico-historical sources, thus raising the early chronicles of the Mexican nation to the heights of foundational mythology:

He aquí este libro: sus brillantes hojas
Llenas están de ínclitas hazañas:
Un imperio vastísimo que lleva
De un polo al otro sus invictas armas

[Behold this book: its brilliant pages / Brim with illustrious feats— / The vastest empire which transports / Its undefeated arms from pole to pole]

Indeed, El Anáhuac, dedicated to the Mexican hero-turned-dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876),1 carries on for nearly five hundred pages and, in more than two thousand quatrains, both narrates and reconfigures the story of a cultural and ethnic clash that, in turn, would lend itself to the composition of Mexico’s first national epic.

1 Santa Anna is, along with emperor Agustín de Iturbide (1783–1824) and dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915), one of the three favourite villains of Mexico’s post-revolutionary, governmental officialism. Santa Anna was responsible for the signing, in 1853, of the Treaty of La Mesilla, also known as The Gadsden Purchase, whereby Mexico sold to the United States a large portion of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico.