From 1844 onwards he studied Latin in a school in Vilela de Nemiña which belonged to his cleric relative, Cristobal Lago.

[citation needed] He would soon retire and come back to the house of his family, where he lived with regular trips to Santiago de Compostela and A Coruña (Corunna), where he visited a library called A Cova Céltica, debating with Martínez Salazar, Manuel Murguía, Florencio Vaamonde, Martelo Paumán, Urbano Lugris and others.

Through Murguía, Pondal would get to know James Macpherson's poetry, and decided to become the "bardo" (bard) of the Galician nation, becoming the guide and interpreter of the route it would follow.

Galician-Celtic mythology was almost completely lost in those days, so Pondal had to guess and re-invent it, based on Ossian's poetry, quotations from the Leabhar Gabala and Murguia's analysis.

From a linguistic perspective, Pondal tried to mix the populist style of the Galician of his time, with different scholarly terms in the lexicon and syntax.

[citation needed] He tried to write a long epic poem, Os Eoas, based on the discovery of the Americas, but he was never satisfied with his work and only published a first draft in 1858.