Born to an upper-middle class Catholic family in Santiago, she published two books by her early twenties under another pseudonym, Juana Inés de la Cruz (the name of the seventeenth century Mexican poet and nun).

[1] She credited her maternal grandfather, the classicist and scholar Domingo Sanderson, with introducing her as a young girl to literature and with first opening a door for her upon intellectual vistas beyond those of the Catholic faith.

Winétt de Rokha may have been best known in her lifetime for poems of social protest, such as her lines written in solidarity with the Communists fighting Franco in Spain, or verses in praise of figures that included Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the children of the Soviet Union.

The Chilean poet and visual artist Ludwig Zeller, in a 1945 review published in El Diario, characterized the poetry of Oniromancia as "verse carved into the root of the unconscious, overborne by swells of symbol and myth, full of tenderness and a pleasing melancholy toward everything that is past."

Longer poems from these books include "Forms of Dream" ("Formas del Sueño"), "Language without Words" ("Lenguaje sin Palabras"), and "Chain of Verbs" ("Cadena de Verbos").

Winétt de Rokha's poetic reputation fell into obscurity in the decades following the publication of a posthumous collected volume of her work, Suma y Destino, in 1951.

As the critic Javier Bello writes, "her books, her poems, her ideas, seem not to have been taken seriously beyond their place next to Pablo, next to the cultural network woven by the De Rokha marriage and everyone surrounding the couple.

"[7] Bello considers the cryptic and difficult prose poems of El Valle Pierde Su Atmósfera to be De Rokha's most innovative contribution to Latin American poetry.