The poem narrates an epidemic, the horrible, expiatory attempts at cure, and the fatal wrath upon those, including a young "Christian" boy, suspected of bringing the plague.

At the end, Fierro speaks of changing his name and living in peace, but it is not entirely clear that the duel has been avoided (Borges wrote a short story (El Fin) in which this possibility is played out).

The first line is kept "free" and unrhymed, allowing Hernández to present a "thesis" to the stanza without having to worry about the last word being part of the rhyme scheme.

He hews much closer to the actual payadores, using a mildly archaic style and giving a sense of place more through phonetic spellings than through choice of words.

Martín Fierro was an immediate popular success; it was also generally well received by the critics, although it required more than a generation for the work to be accorded the status of a classic.

Borges, who describes the work as more of a "verse novel" than an "epic", points out that this is partly because it is such an accurate evocation of its own time that it took some distance before its greatness could become apparent.

The poem received its canonization during a series of lectures by Leopoldo Lugones in 1913 (published as El payador in 1916),[2] where the eminent Argentine poet crowned the Martín Fierro the epic of Argentina, comparable to Dante's Divine Comedy for Italy or Cervantes's Don Quixote for Spain.

However today, the scholarly approach of Tiscornia and others, such as Francisco Castro and Santiago Lugones, have helped make the poem accessible to those far from the Argentine context.

Among more contemporary critics, Calixto Oyuela tried to bring the focus back from the national to the individual, a critique similar to Martínez Estrada's; he emphasized that this is the story of a particular man, a gaucho in the last days of the open range; he sees the book as a meditation on origins, a protest and a lament for a disappearing way of life.

In Folletos Lenguaraces, Vicente Rossi goes beyond Oyuela to pick up where Borges left off, by seeing Fierro as an "orillero", basically a hoodlum.

In particular, he characterizes as "unfortunate" that the Argentines read the story of Fierro forcing a duel of honor upon a man and ultimately killing him "with indulgence or admiration, rather than with horror".

[5] Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño wrote in his essay Derivas de la pesada: "poetically Martín Fierro is not a marvel.

In 1972, Billiken magazine published comic books written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and drawn by Carlos Roume.

[9] In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, a group of Argentine anarchists led by Francisco Squalidozzi collaborate with a German filmmaker, Gerhardt von Göll, to create a film version of Martín Fierro.