- Poet, intellectual, essayist, diplomat, Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most outstanding writers in Mexican history.
Poet, intellectual, essayist, diplomat, Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most outstanding writers in Mexican history, he left us 25 years ago, but his voice resonates in all Mexican arts. For many he is the most profound and transcendent poet since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Thinker against the current, critical of his own country with an intellectual gaze, fierce against dictatorships and popularizer of poetry throughout the planet, his work is already immortal, and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. universal recognition.
A fire in 1996 in his apartment in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood destroyed his precious library and plunged the author of The Labyrinth of Solitude into discouragement. In one of his last statements, he opened up as a farewell: “I have no choice but to confess it: I am a writer and writing represents my true vocation. I am present everywhere, and to see better, to burn better, I turn off”. The poet published his first poems at the age of seventeen in the magazine Barandal and years later, in 1939, he directed the magazine Taller and later Hijo Pródigo in 1943.
In those years he traveled to Spain where he made contact with poets and intellectuals of the Republic, who will mark his prose, also with the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda. Another destination that will mark him will be when he enters the Mexican Foreign Service and is sent to Paris, where he contacts poets, surrealist artists and European intellectuals. His poetic work is rich with titles such as Pasado en claro, Mono grammático or La llama doble.