The controversy between classical and romantic is an important topic of the intellectual and journalistic field of the first half of the 19th Century. Poems, letters from readers and articles on this topic published in the newspapers reveal their stance and the position of the writers, often ambiguous. The purpose of our work is to analyze articles published between 1838 and 1840 in Diario de la Tarde (Buenos Aires), El Correo and El Nacional (Montevideo), considered as representative samples of the aesthetic discussion in the contemporary intellectual field of the Río de la Plata. The corpus of our research is composed of the following articles: “El clasicismo y el romanticismo” (Juan Donoso Cortés); “El romanticismo y los románticos” (Ramón de Mesonero Romanos); “Moralidad del romanticismo” (Fernando de la Vera), and “De lo que hoy se llama romanticismo” (Alberto Lista).