section_path: Art and cultural production/Music, song and poetry
section_name: Music, song and poetry
paragraph_text: Music, song and poetry
  
  Song and poetry were highly regarded; there were presentations and poetry contests at most of the Aztec festivals. There were also dramatic presentations that included players, musicians, and acrobats. There were several different genres of cuicatl (song): Yaocuicatl was devoted to war and the god(s) of war, Teocuicatl to the gods and creation myths and adoration of said figures, xochicuicatl to flowers (a symbol of poetry itself and indicative of the highly metaphorical nature of poetry that often used duality to convey multiple layers of meaning). "Prose" was tlahtolli, also with its different categories and divisions.
  
  A key aspect of Aztec poetics was the use of parallelism, using a structure of embedded couplets to express different perspectives on the same element. Some such couplets were diphrasisms, conventional metaphors whereby an abstract concept was expressed metaphorically by using two more concrete concepts. For example, the Nahuatl expression for "poetry" was in xochitl in cuicatl a dual term meaning "the flower, the song".
  
  A remarkable amount of this poetry survives, having been collected during the era of the conquest. In some cases poetry is attributed to individual authors, such as Nezahualcoyotl, tlatoani of Texcoco, and Cuacuauhtzin, Lord of Tepechpan, but whether these attributions reflect actual authorship is a matter of opinion. An important collection of such poems is Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, collected (Tezcoco 1582), probably by Juan Bautista de Pomar, and the Cantares Mexicanos. Both men and women were poets in Aztec society, illustrating pre-Hispanic Mexico's gender parallelism in upper-class society. One famous female poet is Macuilxochitzin, whose work primarily focused on the Aztec conquest.