During his lifetime his body of work was published in journals and periodical publications which were compiled in 1911 - four years after the poet's death - by Ernesto Montenegro under the title of Alma Chilena (The Chilean Soul) – the name of one of Pezoa Véliz's most renowned and cited poem.

A poet representative of the roots and voice of the Chilean people; his themes and subject matter derived from sensitive reflections of rural and urban life, impoverished peasants, renegades, the marginalized, the humiliated and fallen.

His major literary influences were Manuel Gutierrez Nájera, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Edgar Allan Poe, Rubén Darío and a taste for modernism for its “oddities” which was influential in the era; but in his work there is also a social element which could have been derived from reading Maxim Gorki and Leo Tolstoy.

This occupation as a journalist served as a medium that allowed Pezoa Véliz to get close – albeit, as reporter - to the workings and customs of the offices of nitrate mines of the north of Chile, which was vividly documented in his short story: El taita de la oficina.

He continued publishing poetry, verse and narratives in the magazine La lira chilena (The Chilean lyric poem), Pluma y lapis (Writer and pen) and Luz y sombra (Light and shadow) inter alia.