Although the poetry of Ecuador is of relatively little importance as compared with that of several other American countries, yet Ecuador gave to the world one of the greatest of American poets, José Joaquín de Olmedo. In the Americas that speak Castilian, Olmedo has only two peers among the classic poets, the Venezuelan Bello and the Cuban Heredia. Olmedo was born in Guayaquil in 1780, when that city still formed part of the Virreinato del Perú. Consequently, two countries claim him,—Peru, because he was born a Peruvian, and because, furthermore, he received his education at the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima; and Ecuador, since Guayaquil became permanently a part of that republic, and Olmedo identified himself with the social and political life of that country. In any case, Olmedo, as a poetic genius, looms suddenly on the horizon of Guayaquil, and for a time after his departure there was not only no one to take his place, but there were few followers of note.
Olmedo ranks as one of the great poetic artists of Spanish literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He is of the same semi-classic school as Quintana, and like him devoted to artistic excellence and lyric grandiloquence. The poems of Olmedo are few in number for so skilled an artist, and thoroughly imbued with the Græco-Latin classical spirit. His prosody nears perfection; but is marred by an occasional abuse of verbal endings in rime, and the inadvertent employment of assonance where there should be none, a fault common to most of the earlier Spanish-American poets. Olmedo's greatest poem is La victoria de Junín, which is filled with sweet-sounding phrases and beautiful images, but is logically inconsistent and improbable. Even Bolivar, the "Libertador," censured Olmedo in a letter for using the machina of the appearance at night before the combined Colombian and Peruvian armies of Huaina-Capac the Inca, "showing himself to be a talkative mischief-maker where he should have been lighter than ether, since he comes from heaven," and instead of desiring the restoration of the Inca dynasty, preferring "strange intruders who, though avengers of his blood, are descendants of those who destroyed his empire."
The Canto al general Flores is considered by some critics to be the poet's most finished work, though of less substance and inspiration than La victoria de Junín. This General Flores was a successful revolutionary leader during the early days of the Republic; and he was later as bitterly assailed by Olmedo as he is here praised. Of a different type is the philosophic poem, Á un amigo en el nacimiento de su primogénito, which is filled with sincere sympathy and deep meditation as to the future. With the coming of middle age Olmedo's poetic vein had apparently been exhausted, and the Peruvian bard Felipe Pardo addressed to him an ode in which he sought, though to no avail, to stimulate the older poet to renewed activity (Poesías, Valparaíso, 1848, Paris, 1853; Poesías inéditas, Lima, 1861).
For a time after Olmedo's muse had become mute, little verse of merit was produced in Ecuador. Gabriel García Moreno (1821-1875), once president of the Republic and a champion of Catholicism, wrote a few strong satires in the style of Jovellanos. Dolores Veintemilla de Galindo (1831-1857), who committed suicide on account of domestic infelicity, left a short poem, Quejas, which is unique in the older Spanish-American literature by reason of its frank confession of feeling. The reflexive and didactic poet Numa P. Llona (1832-___) was the author of passionate outpourings of doubt and despair after the fashion of Byron and Leopardi (Poesías, Paris, 1870; Cantos americanos, Paris, 1866; Cien sonetos, Quito, 1881). The gentle, melancholy bard, Julio Zalumbide (1833-1887), at first a skeptic and afterwards a devout believer in Christianity, wrote musical verse in correct language but of little force. Juan León Mera (1832-1894) was one of the most prominent literary historians and critics of the Republic. Besides his Poesías (2d ed., Barcelona, 1893), León Mera left a popular novel, Cumandá (Quito, 1876; Madrid, 1891), an Ojeada histórico-crítica sobre la poesía ecuatoriana (2d ed., Barcelona, 1893), and a volume of Cantares del Pueblo (Quito, 1892), published by the Academia del Ecuador, which contains, in addition to many semi-popular songs in Castilian, a few in the Quichua language.
A younger generation that has already done some good work in poetry includes Vicente Pedrahita, Luis Cordero, Quintiliano Sánchez and Remigio Crespo y Toral.
References: Men. Pel., Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Amer., III, p. lxxxiii f.; Blanco García, III, 350 f.; Ensayo sobre la literatura ecuatoriana, Dr. Pablo Herrera, Quito, 1860; Ojeada histórico-crítica sobre la poesía ecuatoriana, Juan León Mera, Quito, 1868, 2d ed., Barcelona, 1893; Escritores españoles é hispano-americanos, Cañete, Madrid, 1884; Lira ecuatoriana, Vicente Emilio Molestina, Guayaquil, 1865; Nueva lira ecuat., Juan Abel Echeverría, Quito, 1879; Parnaso ecuat., Manuel Gallegos Naranjo, Quito, 1879; América poética, Juan María Gutiérrez, Valparaíso, 1846 (the best of the early anthologies: contains a few poems by Olmedo); Antología ecuat., published by the Academy of Ecuador, with a second volume entitled Cantares del pueblo ecuat. (Edited by Juan León Mera), both Quito, 1892.
Peru. The literature of Ecuador is so closely associated with that of Peru, that the one cannot be properly treated without some account of the other. The Virreinato del Perú was the wealthiest and most cultivated Spanish colony in South America, and in North America only Mexico rivaled it in influence. Lima, an attractive city, thoroughly Andalusian in character and appearance, was the site of important institutions of learning, such as the famed Universidad de San Marcos. It had, moreover, a printing-press toward the close of the sixteenth century, a public theater by 1602, and a gazette by the end of the seventeenth century. The spread of learning in colonial Peru may be illustrated by the fact that the Jesuits alone, at the time of their expulsion in 1767, had twelve colleges and universities in Peru, the oldest of which dated from the middle of the sixteenth century and offered courses in philosophy, law, medicine and theology.
The Peruvians seem to have been content with their lot as a favored Spanish colony, and they declared for independence only when incited to do so and aided by Bolivar of Colombia and San Martin of Buenos Aires. After the revolution, Peru was torn by internal discord rather more than other Spanish-American countries during the period of adolescence; and it was its misfortune to lose territory after territory. Bolivar took northern Peru, including the valuable seaport of Guayaquil, and made it a part of the first Colombia; and largely through the influence of Bolivar much of Upper Peru was made a separate republic, that of Bolivia. Lastly, Chile, for centuries a dependency of Peru, became independent and even wrested a considerable stretch of the litoral from her former mistress. It is hard to realize that Peru, to-day relatively weak among the American countries, was once the heart of a vast Inca empire and later the colony whose governors ruled the territories of Argentina and Chile to the south, and of Ecuador and Colombia to the north. With the decline of wealth and political influence there has come to Peru a decadence in letters. Lima is still a center of cultivation, a city in which the Castilian language and Spanish customs have been preserved with remarkable fidelity; but its importance is completely eclipsed by such growing commercial centers as Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, and by relatively small and conservative towns such as Bogotá.
In the sixteenth century Garcilasso Inga de la Vega (his mother was an "Inga," or Inca, princess), who had been well trained in the Latin classics by Spanish priests, wrote in excellent prose his famous works, Florida del Inca, Comentarios reales and Historia general del Perú. The second work, partly historical and largely imaginary, purports to be a history of the ancient Incas, and pictures the old Peru as an earthly paradise. This work has had great influence over Peruvian and Colombian poets. Menéndez y Pelayo (Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Amer., III, Introd.) considers Garcilasso, or Garcilaso, and Alarcón the two truly classic writers that America has given to Spanish literature.
In the Golden Age of Spanish letters several Peruvian poets were known to Spaniards. Cervantes, in the Canto de Calíope and Lope de Vega in the Laurel del Apolo make mention of several Peruvians who had distinguished themselves by their verses.