Catalonia's towering Romantic poet and rebel priest, Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902
), delves deep into the Catalan imaginary in his foundational long poem Mount Ca
nigo (1886), recounting the historical and legendary mix, both tragic and triump
hant, of the medieval origins of modern Catalonia. The collision between duty an
d love is mirrored by the symbolic conflict between, on the one hand, a powerful
folk mythology rooted in the natural geography and, on the other, the widely in
stitutionalized universalism of Christianity concomitant to the reconquest of th
e Iberian peninsula.
