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n his lectures on Elizabethan literature, Hazlitt explains the ferment of the age through the influence of the Reformation:

This event gave a mighty impulse and increased activity to thought and inquiry, and agitated the inert mass of accumulated prejudices throughout Europe. . . . Liberty was held out to all to think and speak the truth. Men’s brains were busy; their spirits stirring; their hearts full; and their hands not idle.

He also attributes a significant role to the translation of the Bible:

It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and morality, which had been there locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the visions of the prophets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers (such they were thought) to the meanest of the people. It gave them a common interest in the common cause. Their hearts burnt within them as they read. It gave a mind to the people, by giving them common subjects of thought and feeling.

This double explanation prefigures the concerns about atmosphere and audience of Arnold and Eliot. It is persuasive, particularly in Hazlitt’s ardent language: “a mighty impulse,” “a secret spring,” “the rich treasures of religion and morality,” “a common interest in the common cause.” There is a suggestion of inevitability—the inevitability that has ever accounted for Shakespeare’s greatness, if not Jonson’s, Middleton’s, and Marlowe’s. If one turns to the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the equally compelling effects of the Counter-Reformation, the literary landscape is of a markedly different quality. Prieto, with his freethinking vehemence, characterizes the age as one of “marasmus and shame, without customs, without language, without anything original, a blend of hypocrisy and avarice, of insufficiency and petulance.” Paz, in contrast, commends its rigorous harmony: “Society was governed by a Christian order that is not different from that which is admired in temples and poems.” Stasis underlies both valuations. Stasis at the cost of a lively literature like that of Elizabethan England. As Ureña comments, legal dispositions passed in 1532 and in 1543 prohibited “for all colonies, the circulation of pure imaginative works, in prose or in verse.” The Counter-Reformation held thought and inquiry suspect. The Bible remained locked for the majority of the population. Thus, New Spain was deprived of its own Shakespeare, of its own Renaissance.

A certain kind of critic and a certain kind of reader can fall for this spurious contrast. A critic and a reader who are fundamentally incurious, who imbibe the platitudes of self-proclaimed humanists, who disbelieve in humanity’s resourcefulness. Indeed, New Spain was poor in novels and in poetry of a specific kind. Much of the world’s interest has always focused rather on its historiography (Las Casas, Sahagún, Clavijero) and on its philosophy (Vera Cruz, Sigüenza y Góngora, Gamarra). Yet in the words of one of its dramatists, there were “more poets than manure.” Renaissance Spanish poets such as Garcilaso and Boscán had exerted an overpowering influence, and the inaugurators of the Spanish Golden Age pointed in new directions. The spirit was torn between the exigencies of the sacred and the tempting call of the profane. Naturally, it was easier to avoid the conflict altogether—circumstantial verse assisted in filling the quota of encomia and placated the hypergraphia; that is, there was a profusion of third-rate work. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the few literary figures from New Spain who have achieved world standing, transformed this tension, however, into “First Dream,” a summit of Mexican poetry. She faced an impossible conciliation in fact yet triumphed through the imaginative recreation of this very impossibility. But she had not been the only superb artist among theologians. In a sense, she represented a culmination, the “happy consortium” of three great epochal styles: that of Lope, of Góngora, and of Quevedo.

Bernardo de Balbuena (1562–1627), her predecessor, faced too the problem of clashing influences. As a priest, he sought a commanding place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; as a poet, he sought to rival Ariosto, Ovid, Virgil, and Homer. But his approach was less tinged with contrition. It is in full display in his Apologetic Compendium, a gorgeous opuscule in which he traces the divine nature of poetry back to Moses, David, and Solomon:

In the end, the sheer force of his harp, his music, and his poetry was such that one can say about him only what the poets said in praise of Orpheus and Amphion: for if the latter walled Thebes with his harp, and the former moved mountains, restrained rivers, and suspended hell with his lyre, with that of David atrocious and rebellious spirits are tamed today, indomitable and barbarous customs are reached and tempered, the sacred walls of heavenly Jerusalem from living stones are edified.

Having thus established its pedigree, he allows himself to revel in its more formal aspects:

The elegance of the words, the propriety of the language, the soft and beautiful movements; the sharp, orderly, and new ways of saying; the abundance, clarity, dignity, the delicate style; the ordinary and common articulated as particular and extraordinary, and what is more, the extraordinary and difficult articulated as ordinary and easy—everything is in the jurisdiction of the poet, who has the duty of universality, in prose and in verse, in one and the other genre, and this with distinction and lavishness.

Perhaps it is owing to this eclecticism that his name does not appear in “the census of immortal names.” His struggle is muted; his adaptability, questionable. “To attain glory  . . . it is not necessary that a writer show himself sentimental, but it is necessary that his work, or biographical circumstance, stimulate pathos,” says Borges. Balbuena was a cheerful man, a disadvantage that Rabelais overcame by staking territory in a rising form and Lope by leading an adventurous life. Balbuena, moreover, dedicated his life to El Bernardo, an epic poem in five thousand octaves. And though Ureña has compared it to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, posterity is eminently impatient with what it perceives to be a transgression of reasonable artifice, more so if it comes in bulk.

Providentially, Balbuena also worked at a more modest scale. Grandeur of Mexico (1604), a descriptive poem in nine chapters addressed to a fledgling nun, has been edited a number of times since the XIXth century. It has not reached other languages, other literatures, but it lives. It is rich in what Huxley calls “the ultimate magic”: verbal recklessness.

For he who in greedy palate and soul
of esurient Epicurus probes and trails
the infamous sect and sickening chair;

if his stomach and gut hounds him,
and of it he makes a coarse, obscene god,
who compels endless sacrifice,

let him demand at whim, spare no expense,
for in its fair and ample plazas
he will see one-act farces overmuch.

In Balbuena’s effort to celebrate Mexico extravagantly, he plays with alliteration, anastrophe, accumulatio, antithesis, anaphora, chiasmus, parallelism, polyptoton, syncope—and in the luxuriant ornamental structures that grow, one detects brilliant anticipations. Reyes accurately describes him as a “searcher, miner, goldsmith, coiner, and craftsman.”

In sum, nymphs, gardens, and orchards,
crystals, palms, ivies, elms, walnuts,
almonds, pines, poplars, laurels,

beeches, mulberries, vines, cypresses, cedars,
firs, boxwoods, oaks, tamarisks, holms,
grapevines, arbutus, loquats, servals,

orange blossoms, opium poppies, pinks,
roses, carnations, lilies, madonnas,
rosemaries, stocks, eglantines, sloes,

sandalwoods, clovers, balm, verbenas,
jasmines, sunflower, guava berry, broom,
myrtle, chamomiles of gold overfull,

thyme, hay, pepperweed in branches hidden,
basils, jonquils, and ferns,
and all other bloom in April scattered,

here with thousand beauties and profits
all by the sovereign hand were given.
This is their place, and this their fallow land,
and this the Mexican spring.

Discovery is a singular merit of the Baroque: its exploratory spirit is bound to stumble upon uncharted forms through its ceaseless, labyrinthine gyrations. And Balbuena exploits in his eclectic manner another of its merits: architectonic vision. The first chapter invokes Balbuena’s muse, Isabel de Tobar, the future nun, and proceeds to describe in a Whitmanian catalogue the Protean manifestations of self-interest upon which the city is built. Then appear the edifices in the second chapter, the sources of wealth in the third, the occupations of the people in the fourth, the feasts in the fifth, and in an unexpected lyrical ascent, the delights of nature in the sixth—government and religion occupy the last two chapters respectively, before the vigorous epilogue, which is a synthesis of the whole. This crude outline omits the numerous digressions (most of them personal, charming, and erudite), but allows for a better vista of the construction. Balbuena shifts the poetic genre according to the subject, as if intent on pursuing the dynamism of folds: now he is satiric, now he is elegiac; now tragic, now comic; now heroic, now pastoral. In light of this, one can understand why Ureña compares the Grandeur with the Metropolitan Sanctuary, a baroque temple annexed to the Metropolitan Cathedral, and why Lazo says that in the poem “one discovers a firm lineal structure, a geometric structure like that of a classical temple covered by an abundant foliage of baroque volutes and arabesques in sumptuous color and sonority.

The constitutionally intellectual imagination of Sor Juana has granted a formidable view of her epoch; it would be fitting for the constitutionally pictorial imagination of Balbuena to complete this view. Together, their lives span a difficult moment for the artistic spirit in what would become the nation of Mexico. Again, it could be argued that they were never wholly poets, that their inner censor demanded too many victories to the nun and to the priest. It could be argued, following Hazlitt, Arnold, and Eliot, that their audience was far too negligible and unliterary. But that is in the nature of the activity. The poet’s self is spasmodically unitary, and the audience is mostly absent. The work is always a cluster of evasions and confrontations, an effort toward a tenuous, half-glanced state of grace. “This imminence of a revelation, which never comes to fruition, is, perhaps, the aesthetic event.” Or, to put it in Balbuena’s own terms: poets were crowned with ivy, a vine that through artifice embraces and clasps the tree and the house, persisting in its hold even after they collapse.