ABSTRACT
The national poet of Uruguay, Juan Zorrilla de San Martín is the foremost local representative of Romanticism and one of the last Romantic poets in Spanish. His most famous work, Tabaré, came out the same year as Rubén Darío’s Azul, 1888 [Blue]. A committed but liberal Catholic, Zorrilla engaged in debates with the prevailing contemporary positivists, who nevertheless respected him. He wrote in different genres but with a consistency of sentiment and belief across all of his work. He began as a poet and later turned to the essay; he is also one of the greatest exponents of public oratory in modern Spanish.
