Our first poet was Jēkabs Ķikulis, a peasant who in 1777 wrote songs in the spirit and tradition of his time. Ever since we have always much revered our poets, for they are the ones who put our thoughts into words. For speaking the truth poets have suffered all kinds of punishment, but we have at least given them moral satisfaction by remembering them even after their death. Poets like Andrejs Pumpurs, the author of our first epic poem Lāčplēsis, Eduards Veidenbaums, Jānis Poruks, and Kārlis Skalbe are our spiritual heroes.

Latvians still like to read poetry. When appearing before an audience, we often say, "As the poet puts it…" For us, the most beautiful moments in poetry happened in the early 20th century. Even when Latvia was just a tiny province of the Russian Empire, the poetry of Rainis and Aspazija was filled with fresh romanticism; in Viktors Eglītis and Fallijs we had our decadents, in Kārlis Skalbe a symbolist. Revolutionary texts excited the young people's minds and they were ready to die, as poet Jānis Akuraters puts it, "with a battle cry upon their lips" for the sake of a better future. Weaving quotations of verse by classics inspired by the Muses into everyday speech is still considered colloquial chic.

A nation’s poetry is in every way unique, and ours is no exception. The urban romanticism of Aleksandrs Čaks is still unsurpassed. The Soviet era brought in new literary concepts like socialist realism. The first years of Soviet literature saw battles between the socialist realists and the romantics, who were being accused of formalism. Guess who won — a third faction, the critics! They were the ones to merge the languages of ideology and aesthetics and set the overall course literature was to follow, putting their efforts into ideologisation, denunciation and attacking when “errors” were found in authors' creative work. It must be difficult to imagine what it was like to have socialist realism glorified as the collective creative effort andmass-production of the socialist canon, where any deviation from the generally established normwas considered a punishable offence. In a way it was like the birth of a foetus conceived forcibly, leading to the delivery of literary monsters: odes to the leader, panegyrics to Moscow, tractors, the Soviet Army… Now of course we can laugh about it, which is exactly what we do.

In the 1960s and 1970s poetry strove to become a social phenomenon. We had to "too much joy in life for writing wistful verse". Poetry celebrating the individual freedom arrived on the scene, calling for independence from external conditions; natural and human verse was born under inhuman conditions where it was “easier to die than to go on living". We drew strength from the poetry of Ojārs Vācietis, Imants Ziedonis, Vizma Belševica, Māris Čaklais, and Knuts Skujenieks. In the era of canons we managed to blossom. We have our literary marginalists inMāris Melgalvs andJānis Rokpelnis; the last of the romantics inEgils Plaudis, and Leons Briedis; archaists who measure themselves against the historical dimension inUldis Bērziņš, Juris Kunnoss, and Pēters Brūveris; and quite a few brilliant youngsters who discard rhythm and the traditional methods of versification. We have poets like Māra Zālīte and Klāvs Elsbergs in whose stanzas the music and rhythm of poetry are paramount. Those were and still are sung by all of us: "Onward, steeds of my dreams! Onward, my scrags!"