[1] The importance of Víctor de la Guardia y Ayala is that he was born in Panama, contrary to others that came from Spain and, for this reason, for a while he was considered the "first Panamanian poet".
[2] However, the discovery of some manuscripts which come from the 17th century caused the revision of this idea, because the first reference from this period which indicates a written production by Panamanian authors (in other words, born in Panama) dates from 1638 and it is an anthology called "Llanto de Panamá a la muerte de don Enrique Enríquez" (Crying from Panama at the Death of Don Enrique Enríquez).
Another important poet was León Antonio Soto (1874–1902), who died at a young age when tortured by the police for having championed the cause of Panama.
Two literary magazines focused mainly on the dissemination of the modernist movement: El Heraldo del Istmo (1904–1906), directed by Guillermo Andreve (1879–1940), and Nuevos Ritos (1907), founded by Ricardo Miró (1883–1940).
Since 1930, coinciding with the "Communal Action" (Acción Comunal) youth revolution, a new generation of poets, grouped around the magazine Antena, distanced itself from modernist rhetoric, instead approaching the avant-garde.
In 1957, he published his poetry collection Canto de amor para la Patría novia, a poetic history of the Panamanian nation.
Major poets of the next generation included Benjamín Ramón (1939), Bertalicia Peralta (1939), Ramón Oviero (1939–2008), Moravia Ochoa López (1941), Dimas Lidio Pitty (1941-2015), Roberto Fernández Iglesias (1941), Eric Arce (1942), Enrique Jaramillo Levi (1944), Jarl Ricardo Babot (1945), Giovanna Benedetti (1950), Manuel Orestes Nieto (1951), Moisés Pascual (1955), Consuelo Tomás (1957), Leoncio Obando (b. Lidice, 1959 - d. La Chorrera, 2023), Héctor M. Collado (1960), and Pablo Menacho (1960).
Of these, Salomón Ponce Aguilera (1868–1945), Guillermo Andreve, Gaspar Octavio Hernández (1883–1940), and Ricardo Miró (1883–1940) stand out as poets whose short stories, often scattered and unpublished, were picked up and commented on by writer Mario Augusto Rodríguez in 1956.
Other authors of this generation included Lucas Bárcenas (1906–1992), César Candanedo (1906–1993), Renato Ozores (1910–2001), Alfredo Cantón (1910-1967), Ricardo Bermúdez (1914–2000), Mario Augusto Rodríguez (1917–2009) (author of Campo Adentro (1947), Luna en Veraguas (1948), and Los ultrajados (1994)), José María Sánchez (1918–1973), Ramón H. Jurado (1922–1978), Joaquín Beleño (19211–988), Carlos Francisco Changmarín (1922–2012), Jorge Turner (1922–2011), Tristán Solarte (1924–2019) and José Guillermo Ros-Zanet (1930).
Major authors of this generation include Ernesto Endara (1932), Álvaro Menéndez Franco (1932), Enrique Chuez (1934), Justo Arroyo (1936), Rosa María Britton (1936), Victoria Jiménez Vélez (1937), Pedro Rivera (1939), Benajamín Ramón (1939), Beatríz Valdés (1940), Gloria Guardia (1940), Dimas Lidio Pitty (1941), Moravia Ochoa López (1941), Mireya Hernández (1942–2006), Enrique Jaramillo Levi (1944), Isabel Herrera de Taylor (1944), Raúl Leis (1947), Giovanna Benedetti (1949), Lupita Quirós Athanasiadis (1950), Rey Barría (1951), Ramón Fonseca Mora (1952), Herastro Reyes (1952–2005), Claudio de Castro (1957), Consuelo Tomás (1957), Yolanda Hackshaw (1958), Allen Patiño (1959), Rafael Alexis Álvarez (1959), Ariel Barría Alvarado (1959), Héctor Collado (1960), Gonzalo Menéndez González (1960), David Robinson Orobio (1960), Erika Harris (1963), and Rogelio Guerra Ávila (1963).
This generation is characterized by the use of short fiction, poetic and imaginative language, and human themes, in which the individual stands out above a chaotic, typically urban environment.