Ramón López Velarde

He was the first of nine children of José Guadalupe López Velarde, a lawyer from Jalisco, and Trinidad Berumen Llamas, who came from a local landowning family.

During one of these trips, he met Josefa de los Ríos, a distant relative eight years his senior, who made a deep impression on him.

The Bohemio group sided with Manuel Caballero, a Catholic Integralist opposed to literary modernism, during the controversy surrounding the 1907 reappearance of the polemical Revista Azul.

In San Luis Potosí Velarde read modernist poetry, especially that of Amado Nervo, to whom he will refer as "our greatest poet",[1] and Andrés González Blanco.

During the years of the Mexican Revolution, López Velarde openly supported the political reforms of Francisco Madero, whom he met personally in 1910.

In 1915 López Velarde began to write more personal poems, marked by their nostalgia for his native Jerez (to which he would never return), and for his first love, "Fuensanta".

The book – and even its title – concerned the Catholic liturgy, which was associated with the idealized world of the author's childhood in Jerez, and identified as the only refuge from his turbulent city life.

Nevertheless, this nostalgia is not free of a certain ironic distance, as in the poem "Tenías un rebozo de seda..." he remembers himself as a "seminarian, without Baudelaire, without rhyme, and without a sense of smell".

The influence of Lugones was evident in the book's tendency to avoid common settings, the employment of vocabulary then considered unpoetical, of unusual adjectives and unexpected metaphors, the use of word games, the frequency of proparoxytones, and the humorous use of rhyme.

In 1920 the revolt of Alvaro Obregón brought an end to the government of Carranza, which for Velarde had been a period of stability and great productivity.

But after a brief period of unrest in Velarde's life, José Vasconcelos was named minister of education, and promised a cultural renovation of the country.

In the latter, Velarde published one of his best-known essays, "Novedad de la Patria", where he expounded on the ideas of his earlier poems.

Also appearing in El Maestro was "La suave patria", which would cement Velarde's reputation as Mexico's national poet.

This formed the basis for a subsequent study by Octavio Paz, included in his book Cuadrivio (1963), in which he argued the modernity of López Velarde, comparing him to Jules Laforgue, Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera.