GUICO, 
LYKA M.
Compare and contrast the literary works of Rizal and Balagtas. Consider any aspects of comparison that you can see.
FRANCISCO BALAGTAS
 Francisco Baltazar (1788 – 1862), popularly
called Balagtas, is the acknowledged master of
traditional Tagalog poetry.
 Great social and political changes in the world
worked together to make Balagtas’ career as poet
possible. The industrial revolution had caused a
great movement of commerce in the globe,
creating wealth and the opportunity for material
improvement in the life of the working classes.
With these great material changes, social values
were transformed, allowing greater social
mobility. In short, he was a child of the global
bourgeois revolution. Liberal ideas, in time,
broke class — and, in the Philippines — even
racial barriers (Medina). The word Filipino,
which used to refer to a restricted group (i.e.,
Spaniards born in the Philippines) expanded to
include not only the acculturated wealthy
Chinese mestizo but also the acculturated Indio
(Medina). Balagtas was one of the first Indios to
become a Filipino.
 But the crucial element in Balagtas’ unique
genius is that, being caught between two cultures
(the native and the colonial/classical), he could
switch codes (or was perceived by his compatriot
audience to be switching codes), provide insight
and information to his oppressed compatriots in
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DR. JOSE RIZAL
 chose the realistic novel as his medium. Choosing
Spanish over Tagalog meant challenging the oppressors
on the latter’s own turf. By writing in prose, Rizal also cut
his ties with the Balagtas tradition of the figurative
indirection which veiled the supposed subversiveness of
many writings at that time.
 In a sense, Rizal’s novels and patriotic poems were the
inevitable conclusion to the campaign for liberal reforms
known as the Propaganda Movement, waged by Graciano
Lopez Jaena, and M.H. del Pilar. The two novels so
vividly portrayed corruption and oppression that despite
the lack of any clear advocacy, they served to instill the
conviction that there could be no solution to the social ills
but a violent one.
 Rizal’s two novels, the Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El
Filibusterismo, chronicle the life and ultimate death of
Ibarra, a Filipino educated abroad, who attempts to reform
his country through education. At the conclusion of the
Noli, his efforts end in near-death and exile from his
country. In the Filibusterismo, he returns after reinventing
himself as Simoun, the wealthy jeweler, and hastens
social decay by further corrupting the social fabric till the
oppressed react violently to overthrow the system.