European Romanticism had introduced Spanish-American writers to the idea of originality in literature, and as they looked around their continent at the Andean ranges, the pampa and the forests and at the nomadic Indians and gauchos of the interior, they could not but be impressed by the wealth of material. Yet they were slow to realise that originality was not simply a question of the raw materials but also of finding the right forms in which the new experience could be expressed. The prestige of European poets like Byron, Goethe, Heine and Hugo was too vast for much of account to be written outside their shadow, and it is no accident that some of the major Romantic poets such as Rafael Pombo (Colombia, 1833–1912) and Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (1846–1912) were enthusiastic translators. Examples of their writing and that of other nineteenth-century poets such as Jose Eusebio Caro (Colombia, 1817–53), Gregorio Gutiérrez González (1826–72), Manuel Flores (Mexico, 1840–85), Manuel Acuña (Mexico, 1849–73) and Olegario Victor Andrade (Argentina, 1839–82) can be read in the anthology which the Spanish scholar, Menéndez y Pelayo, compiled and published between 1893 an 1895. Though many of these poets deal with patriotic themes and American landscape, this usually means little more than introducing regional place names and names of trees or birds into poems which were often traditional in form. In Spanish–American poetry, originality was to be stumbled upon almost by accident in the songs of the gaucho minstrels who inspired a gauchesque tradition that was ignored by serious Spanish–American critics until the twentieth century.