The Modernist movement in Spanish- American poetry was not an isolated phenomenon but had its counterpart in France, Italy and Spain as well as in Germany, England and the United States. It developed when the Romantic movement began to lose its force and ceased to satisfy the aesthetic aspirations of the more ardent poetic spirits of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In Spanish- American countries this development was less pronounced than elsewhere, for there Romanticism never took a great hold. It has been pointed out by Menéndez y Pelayo that in so far as Romanticism was the expression of the individualistic revolt against the rigidity of the classical school, it could be, and was transplanted to America, though in the majority of writers it was the worst extravagances of their models,(Byron, Hugo, Espronceda, and Zorrilla) that were most successfully imitated. To the other element in European Romanticism, that based on historic lore and traditions that had come down from medieval times, there was nothing corresponding in America, inasmuch as the traditions of the modern Mexican or Peruvian, for example, were European and had no living roots in the history or legends of the vanished Aztecs or Incas. Moreover, there were in America none of the Gothic cathedrals and feudal castles that served as inspiration for romantic dreams in Europe; and hence there could not possibly exist that mysterious interpenetration of landscape and history which forms one of the greatest charms of Romantic poetry in Europe.