Abstract
Being considered “scarce, weak, and minor” —mainly within the work of later poets like Altamirano or the Modernists— may be the reason this poetry has not been sufficiently studied. The author believes that Mexican poetry from that period suggests clues for better understanding the lyric, under the light of an oscillatory country overwhelmed by financial trouble and political and social disputes. The revision of strategic problems points out some of the emotional conflicts where the writers were submerged, and permits the understanding of the criollo cultural project from that first half of the xx Century. The topic of disillusionment, in contrast with optimism, will be one of the key axes in searching for the national identity. Casimiro del Collado, Ignacio Rodríguez Galván and José María Esteva, among others, are some of the authors whose poetry reflects the preoccupation for building a nation under the trusteeship of a class self conceived as orphaned and weak.