This dissertation takes up the intellectual debate and exchange of ideas that marked the political and cultural life of Brazil after independence in 1822, and which happened in the core of the need to build a project to form national identity in order to ensure the consolidation of the Nation and the consciousness of its inhabitants to be part of it. Basing initial Brazilian experiences of thinking nation, when it was yet to be formed, the romanticism in Brazil had a historic opportunity. In this sense, we investigate and discuss, based on the relationship between history and literature, the romantic and pedagogical production of the popular poet Juvenal Galeno (born in Ceará, northeast Brazil), especially in his most significant work Lendas e Canções Populares (Legends and Folk Songs), 1865. Galeno traveled through coast, mountain and backcountry of Ceará, conducting ethnographic research and collecting data in search of national Volksgeist. Using the manifestations of popular culture (traditions, songs, language, images, lines, legends, festivals, work) and extracting of their daily prosaic which would be matter of poetry, Juvenal Galeno produced a work from which we call literary operation which, rather than simply copying and recording folklore of popular culture, uses this concept to germinate a popular poetry whose range is the emancipation of the people from the tutelage of those who exploit them. The relation of the "folklorist" poet with literary institutions and associations that had existed in Ceará in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the Institute of History, Academy of Ceará and Padaria Espiritual, which he was the chief baker, has a special focus, since it elucidates the practice of his engagement in favor of letters and dissemination of new ideas in Ceará provincial.