Among the first texts to be published in Galician in the 19th century, after several hundreds of years in which this language had been virtually absent from written documents, those inspired by the Peninsular War are especially remarkable. The 48-line Procrama na Guerra da Independencia, por un labrador que foy sarxento ós soldados do novo alistamento (“Proclamation during the Peninsular War to the newly called-up soldiers by a farmer who used to be a sergeant”) calls to fight “Pol a Patria e pol o Rey / E morrer por Dios con gusto” (“For our Homeland and for the King / And to be pleased to die for God”). Proezas de Galicia, explicadas bajo la conversación rústica de los dos compadres Chinto y Mingote (“Galicia’s heroic exploits explained as a rustic conversation between two fellows, Chinto and Mingote”, 1810), by José Fernández Neira and possibly based on field notes taken by the author, praises the heroic deeds of Galicians that should be imitated by the Spanish for the total extermination of the invaders. The dialogue form recurred in other – anonymous – pieces: Diálogo entre dos labradores gallegos afligidos y un abogado instruido, despreocupado y compasivo (“Dialogue between two distressed Galician farmers and an educated, carefree, compassionate lawyer”, 1820), La tertulia en la Quintana (“A conversation in La Quintana”, 1820) and La tertulia de Picaños (“A conversation in Picaños”, 1836); such verse appeared in various brochures and in periodicals, while, in the first four decades of the century, occasional spells of freedom of the press made political discourse and criticism of the Church and of corruption possible. The critical or populist intent and the use of Galician is noteworthy.

A dialogue is also the structure underlying Juan Manuel Pintos’s A gaita gallega (“The Galician bagpipes”), a miscellaneous oeuvre that was published in instalments from 1853 onwards. In seven parts or foliadas, this book combines both verse and prose, as well as Galician (used by the Piper), Spanish (spoken by the drummer who acts as his partner in the conversation) and Latin. The heterogeneity of the material served to veil the work’s celebratory highlighting of the Galician language and its patriotic assertions, denunciations and demands.

Patriotic claims were often focused on two sentiments: nostalgia for the homeland, and a critique of Galicia’s socio-economic situation. The best-known poem along these lines is A Galicia (“To Galicia”), successful at the Floral Games of 1861 and written by Francisco Añón, an author whom Manuel Curros Enríquez later acknowledged as a formative influence. Some of the images used in the poem were to remain current themes: the sleeping Galicia that must awake if it is to make any progress, or the “warrior-poet writers”. Curros Enríquez’s work was to consolidate the presence of social and civil demands into this line of committed literature; similar demands occur in the verse of Rosaliá de Castro.

Eduardo Pondal integrated Celticism, bardism, a vocation for epic poetry and elaborate Symbolism into a modern poetic voice. Classical influences are still prominent in his Camões-inspired Os Eoas (a national-epic poem on the discovery of America, it was still unfinished at the time of Pondal’s death in 1917) and Queixumes dos pinos (1886, later adopted as Galicia’s official anthem). Pondal casts himself as the Celtic bard who, using unique rhetorical language inspired by nature, will record the heroic dimension of Galicia’s past. Partly as a result of Pondal’s influence, patriotic momentum took on an epic tone in long poems such as Alberto García Ferreiro’s Lenda de groria (1890) and Florencio Vaamonde’s Os calaicos (1894). The latter, strongly influenced (again) by Camões’s Os Lusíadas, rehearses the theme of the heroic defence of A Coruña against the English under Sir Francis Drake (1589), which had already been the topic of Lenda de groria, also written in ottava rima.

Ramón Cabanillas infused an intensely combative spirit into his patriotic demands in his collection Da terra asoballada of 1917. He was strongly committed to the anti-clientelism of the agrarianist movement and to the nationalism championed by the Irmandades da Fala (“Language Brotherhoods”); both movements regarded Cabanillas as their spokesman. Da terra asoballada merges two lines of thought: one ardently combative and pregnant with denunciation, the other more analytical and addressing the reader with appeals and arguments for recovering self-consciousness. With an extraordinary gifted for poetic metre and with a high musical sensitivity, Cabanillas expressed fierce protests in some poems, such as Acción gallega (1910), which (especially in their sung versions) would later become – and indeed, remain – widely popular.