Appleyard was part of the so called "the fifties generation" in Paraguayan poetry, along with other icons like José María Gómez Sanjurjo, Ricardo Mazó and Ramiro Domínguez, amongst others.

Likewise, he worked in Ultima Hora, the newspaper where "Desde el tiempo que vivo" his column, was one of the most expected by the thousands of readers.

Being invited by many countries, such as the United States of North America and Germany, amongst others, he visited numerous nations in which he gave conferences, and chats and presented his poems.

The also poet and literary critique Roque Vallejos writes in the epilogue of the book "José-Luis Appleyard - Antología poética" published in 1996: "...He has poems of notable social sarcasm that Rafael Barret would have wanted to include in his "Moralidades actuales".

So as in his poem "Hay un sitio" que that states in one of its fragments: There are synonyms clear, translucent: / being free is growing without will / to steal is to rob, love is hate, / and to live is to die defenceless / loneliness is called company/ and betraying is to be loyal to your friends.

Discreetly and with no violence, Appleyard faithfully and severely describes the state of spiritual and semantic emptiness of the words and the trapped feeling that the dictatorship carried within for more than thirty.

A poet that has based all his pieces on freedom couldn't –nor has tried to do so- defend a dogmatic moral that would have fatally led him to mere materialist doctrinism ".

Appleyard himself, in a brief script of June 1981 that introduces his book "Tomado de la mano", expresses the following in relation to his poems: "And this is how, grabbing hands with them, I have found myself in a long journey of years, days and hours that have granted me a bit of everything.