Unlike other literary genres, poetry in Cuba achieved qualities that placed it in a prominent place within Hispanic literature. With logical interactions and overlaps, two fundamental periods can be distinguished: from 1790 to 1820, when Neoclassicism developed, and from 1820 to 1868, a period in which the Romantic ideal prevailed, although it continued to influence part of the independence struggle.

Regarding the first period, Virgilio López Lemus states: “Between 1790 and 1820, as approximate dates, the period of neoclassicism extends, characterized by classical forms similar to those preferably used in the metropolis, with evocations of Greco-Latin gods and a singular hymn to nature as an astonished, even naive, approach to the otherness that it wishes to emphasize, with a clear desire to show its differences in relation to Europe.”

Neoclassicism arrived late in comparison to European, and especially Spanish, poetic production, from which it drew its molds and, at the same time, its conceptual and formal rigidities. The content of Cuban neoclassical poetry already responded to the island’s nature, and this landscape distinction also tended to shape the political distinction expressed in the emerging concept of nationality. However, formally, with its stanza structures and verse patterns, as well as the very aesthetic conception of poetry, what was written in the colony mimicked Spanish poetry itself. The outstanding poet within classicism is Manuel de Zequeira, author of the famous ode “A la Piña,” and Manuel Justo de Rubalcava and Manuel Pérez y Ramírez are also worthy of mention.

However, the significance of Cuban poetry during this period lies in the first generation of Romantic poets, still inspired by neoclassical molds but already embodying a new sensibility: José María Heredia, José Jacinto Milanés, and the unique Plácido, not to mention Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who later contributed to shaping the tradition of this movement. Romanticism during this period also reached its peak with the works of Juan Clemente Zenea and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana.

Our Romanticism was not so indebted to Hispanic literature, as they almost coincided in time, unlike the gap that occurred with Neoclassicism; however, it was bathed in the “poetic waters” of the French influence. In a certain sense, it did not represent a radical break with preceding Neoclassicism, but rather a gradual transition toward its canons. However, in the literary milieu and the major publications of the time, it was initially rejected—later accepted with reluctance—for significantly reversing the dogmatic vision of order, balance, and rationality characteristic of neoclassical poetics.

Although there are common characteristics throughout the Romantic movement that took place in Europe and Latin America, its manifestations in Cuba, due to the country’s somewhat contradictory conditions as an island and a colony, took on a peculiar character. It is worth noting that the Romantic exaltation of the self and its individual freedom—conceived anarchically—in opposition to imposed social morality, was expressed in Cuba through a collective self, a society that collectively aspired to assert itself in freedom. Beyond the purely literary, this would endow Cuban Romanticism with political content and inextricably link it to the yearning for independence, especially in poetry.