Poetry in the Public Sphere in Republican Mexico: A Reading of Ignacio Ramírez

In the middle of the national crisis prompted by the US invasion of 1846 and a heated debate against monarchists, liberal intellectual Ignacio Ramírez, “El Nigromante”, wrote about the limits and the future of poetry. This paper argues that poetry was a central dimension of political discourse in post independence Mexico. Ramírez believed that a new language was necessary to fight the enemies of the republic but also to criticize nationalism.