Introduction: Aztec Poetry

By: Shannon Jelks

May 9, 2025

Aztec (Nahua) poetry has been studied and analyzed by various missionaries, antiquarians, ethnographers, and scholars for the past 500 years. Though there is a large base of academic understanding of Nahua poetry, the information is hard to access, dense, and overwhelming in its expansiveness. This website provides an introduction to understanding Aztec poetry, its historical context, and the changes it underwent pre- and post-Spanish Conquest. This website also features modern Nahuatl poetry because Nahua people continue to write poetry today.

Pre-Colonial Aztec poetry was integral to Aztec society, with its styles, formatting, themes, uses, and conventions. After the Spanish Conquest, Aztec poetry changed in language, form, style, themes, characters, uses, and ideals, and these changes reflect the changes that Aztec society went through as a whole in response to the Spanish invasion. In Aztec culture, poetry was closely tied to politics and religion. “Many poems reflect historical occasions from the mid-1400s to the early 1500s as well as the empire’s political geography and trading patterns (Damrosch, D. 1991).” Poetry also employed many people: the poets (Cuicapicque - Songmakers), musicians who would sometimes accompany performances, poetry teachers, and the performers.

There are two phases to pre-colonial Aztec poetry: the more gentle and aesthetic older songs, which led into the more violent songs during the imperial expansion in the Aztec empire under Itzcoatl from about 1428 to Cortés’ victory over the Aztecs in 1521 (Damrosch, D. 1991). The older poetry tradition included sacred hymns/divine songs addressed to specific deities. These songs were sung in and around temples, while the later “flower songs” were performed more often in homes and other secular venues as well as the house of song (Curl, J. 2001). The “flower songs” were rhythmically similar to patterns of speech, they tended to speak in metaphors, and they frequently used two words paired together. Some examples of these pairings include: “eagles and jaguars,” which represent warriors; “mat and chair”, which represent authority; and “song and flower,” which represents poetry (Curl, J. 2001). The “flower songs” became popularized by “the poet king” Nezahualcoyotl, who has about 30 poems attributed to him. Still, his authorship of all of them is debatable, mainly because of the use of older songs in post-conquest poetry (Lee, J. 2004).

In post-conquest poetry, a few significant changes stand out: the first is ideas surrounding authorship, the second is changes in how Aztec society used/interacted with the poetry, and the third is the practice of reworking older material. The authorship and performance of the songs/poetry were different from the Western European understanding of poetry. “European poems were individual, author and reading oriented, while Nahuatl poems were anonymous, collective, and performance oriented (Lee, J. 2004).” Ideas about authorship started to change with the arrival and influence of Europeans. A big reason for the shifting ideas was that the main chroniclers of Nahua poetry, Pomar and Ixtlilxochitl of Texcoco, were heavily influenced by European literary and religious tradition (Lee, J. 2004). Because of the influence of European constructs on the early compilation of Nahua poetry, some figures come to “represent” Aztec poetry as a whole. Nezahualcoyotl was a king and a poet among other things, who during the late 1500s and early 1600s, after being dead for nearly 150 years, became a sort of King David-like figure. “Cantares (songs) were sifted through in the 1600s for nation-building. They searched for bits of poetry that could be presented as Mexico’s answer to the pastoral tradition of Greece and Rome and the songs of the Biblical poet kings (Swann, B. 2011).” The last change I mentioned was the reworking of older material. The way that the Aztecs used older poetry post-conquest was to shift its meanings to fit the new circumstances. This included adding or changing gods and deities, and the inclusion of older themes in new poems. “Some poetry is the product of two times, for example, a poem might be from 1450 and 1520, or both 1521 and 1570. This is called bivalence (Damrosch, D. 1991).” This practice of recycling old material makes it much harder to date poems, especially pre-conquest poems.

For hundreds of years, the Aztecs have used poetry for religious and political purposes and entertainment. The use of metaphors and paired terms describes battles, and conquest, questioning the meaning of life, love, ecstasy, gods, beauty, and community, to name a few themes. Pre-conquest poetry was more aesthetic and solemn, often attributed to anonymous authors. Post-conquest poetry, with the influence of European conventions, ushered in ideas of individual authorship, bivalence, and it was used to usher in a more Christianized and European Mexico.