He had been a member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua (Chilean Academy of Language) since 1981.

[1] His secondary school years were spent in the Liceos of Los Ángeles, Temuco and in the Internado Nacional Barros Arana in Santiago, and completed his qualification in the Instituto Pedagógico de la Universidad de Chile in 1952.

His literary debut came in 1949 with a collection of poems, Primer consejo a los arcángeles del viento, and by 1952 he had become a critic in journals and newspapers.

In 1974, under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, he gave up his teaching positions in protest at military intervention in Chile's higher education institutions.

From 1981 he was a member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua,[nb 1] and was appointed to the post of director of the Diego Barros Arana Research Centre of the Chilean National Library in 1993.