Ramón López Velarde was a
Mexican

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 poet. His work is generally considered to be postmodern

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

, but is unique for its subject matter. He achieved great fame in his native land, to the point of being considered Mexico's national poet.

Formative years

López Velarde was born in Jerez, Zacatecas

Zacatecas

Zacatecas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Zacatecas is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and its capital city is Zacatecas....

. He was the first of nine children of José Guadalupe López Velarde, a lawyer from Jalisco

Jalisco

Jalisco officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Jalisco is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is located in Western Mexico and divided in 125 municipalities and its capital city is Guadalajara.It is one of the more important states...

, and Trinidad Berumen Llamas, who came from a local landowning family. José, after an unsuccessful law career, had founded a Catholic school in Jerez. In 1900, Ramón was sent to a seminary

Seminary

A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry...

 in Zacatecas, where he remained for two years; later, when his family moved, he transferred to a seminary in Aguascalientes

Aguascalientes

Aguascalientes is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 11 municipalities and its capital city is Aguascalientes....

. In 1905 he abandoned the seminary in favor of a career in the law.

During his years in the seminary, Velarde had spent his holidays in Jerez. 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 earliest poem ascribed to Velarde, "Fuensanta" (1905) is believed to have been inspired by her.

In 1906 he collaborated on the literary review Bohemio, published in Aguascalientes by some of his friends, under the pseudonym of "Ricardo Wencer Olivares". The Bohemio group sided with Manuel Caballero, a Catholic Integralist

Integralism

Integralism, or Integral nationalism, is an ideology according to which a nation is an organic unity. Integralism defends social differentiation and hierarchy with co-operation between social classes, transcending conflict between social and economic groups...

 opposed to literary modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

, during the controversy surrounding the 1907 reappearance of the polemical Revista Azul. However, their intervention had no appreciable effect on Mexican literary culture.

In January 1908 Velarde began his law studies at the University of San Luis Potosí. Soon after, his father died, leaving the family, which had returned to Jerez, in a desperate financial situation. Thanks to the support of his maternal uncles, Velarde was able to continue his studies. He continued to collaborate on various publications in Aguascalientes (El Observador, El Debate, Nosotros) and later in Guadalajara

Guadalajara, Jalisco

Guadalajara is the capital of the Mexican state of Jalisco, and the seat of the municipality of Guadalajara. The city is located in the central region of Jalisco in the western-pacific area of Mexico. With a population of 1,564,514 it is Mexico's second most populous municipality...

 (El Regional, Pluma y Lápiz). Bohemia had ceased to exist by 1907.

In San Luis Potosí

San Luis Potosí

San Luis Potosí officially Estado Libre y Soberano de San Luis Potosí is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and its capital city is San Luis Potosí....

 Velarde read modernist poetry, especially that of Amado Nervo

Amado Nervo

Amado Nervo also known as Juan Crisóstomo Ruiz de Nervo was the Mexican Ambassador to Argentina and Uruguay, journalist, poet, and educator. His poetry was known for its use of metaphor and reference to mysticism, presenting both love and religion, as well as Christianity and Hinduism...

 and Andrés González Blanco. This radically changed his aesthetic sensibilities, transforming him into a fervent defender of modernism. In 1910 he began to write what would later become La sangre devota.

The Revolution

During the years of the Mexican Revolution

Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...

, López Velarde openly supported the political reforms of Francisco Madero, whom he met personally in 1910. In 1911 he received his law degree and became a judge

Judge

A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open...

 in the small town of Venado. However, he left his position at the end of the year and traveled to Mexico City

Mexico City

Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

, hoping that Madero, the new president of the republic, might offer him a position in his government. Madero made no such offer, perhaps because of Velarde's militant Catholicism.

Eduardo J. Correa, his old mentor, hired him in 1912 to collaborate on La Nación, a monthly Catholic journal in Mexico City. Velarde wrote poems, reviews, and political commentary about Mexico's new state of affairs. He attacked, among others, Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata Salazar was a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, and which was initially directed against the president Porfirio Díaz. He formed and commanded an important revolutionary force, the Liberation Army of the South, during the Mexican Revolution...

. He left the journal soon after the revolt of February 9, 1913, which brought Victoriano Huerta

Victoriano Huerta

José Victoriano Huerta Márquez was a Mexican military officer and president of Mexico. Huerta's supporters were known as Huertistas during the Mexican Revolution...

 to power. Trying to escape the political turmoil of Mexico City, he returned to San Luis Potosí. He began his courtship of María de Nevares, which he would continue for the rest of his life, unsuccessfully.

At the beginning of 1914 he settled permanently in Mexico City. In the middle of 1915 the rise to power of Venustiano Carranza

Venustiano Carranza

Venustiano Carranza de la Garza, was one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. He ultimately became President of Mexico following the overthrow of the dictatorial Huerta regime in the summer of 1914 and during his administration the current constitution of Mexico was drafted...

 began a period of relative tranquility. Mexican poetry was currently dominated by the postmodernism of Enrique González Martínez

Enrique González Martínez

Enrique González Martínez was a Mexican poet, diplomat, surgeon and obstetrician. His poetry is considered to be primarily Modernist in nature, with elements of French symbolism....

, for whom Velarde had little admiration. He preferred the work of José Juan Tablada

José Juan Tablada

José Juan Tablada was a Mexican poet, art critic, and diplomat. Traveled briefly in Japan and later translated and wrote haiku, introducing the poetic form to Spanish language readers.-External links:*-Sources:...

, who was also his good friend. During this period he was also interested in the work of the Argentine

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 modernist Leopoldo Lugones

Leopoldo Lugones

Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist.-Early life:Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry...

, who left a decisive influence on Velarde's later work.

Nostalgia

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".

In 1916 he published his first book, La sangre devota (The Pious Blood), which he dedicated to "the spirits" of the Mexican poets Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera was a Mexican writer and political figure.-Background:He was born in Mexico City on December 22, 1859, and in his youth worked as a journalist and was elected as a Deputy....

 and Manuel José Othón

Manuel José Othón

Manuel José Othón was a poet, playwright, and Mexican politician. One of his most famous works is Idilio salvaje considered one of the most representative poems of Mexico....

, and was well-received by the Mexican literary community. 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. The poem "Viaje al terruño" is fundamentally an attempt to evoke a return to childhood. Nevertheless, this nostalgia is not free of a certain ironic

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

 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".

In 1917, Josefa de los Ríos, the inspiration for "Fuensanta", died. Velarde began to work on his next book, Zozobra (Sinking), which would not be published for another two years. Between March and July of that year he collaborated with González Martínez on the review Pegaso. Despite receiving increasing criticism for his Catholicism and provincialism, Velarde's literary prestige also began to rise.

Zozobra

In 1919 Velarde published Zozobra, considered by the majority of critics to be his major work. It was heavily ironic, and drew both from his provincial upbringing and his recent experiences in the city. The influence of Lugones was evident in the book's tendency to avoid common settings, the use of vocabulary then considered unpoetical, the unusual adjective use, unexpected metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

s, the use of word games, the frequency of proparoxytone

Proparoxytone

Proparoxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g the English words cinema and operational. Related terms are paroxytone and oxytone .In English, most nouns of three or more syllables are proparoxtones...

s, and the humorous use of rhyme. In this sense, the work also resembled that of the Uruguay

Uruguay

Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

an poet Julio Herrera y Reissig

Julio Herrera y Reissig

Julio Herrera y Reissig, was a Uruguayan poet, playwright and essayist, who began his career during the late Romanticist period and later became an early proponent of Modernism.-Background:...

. Zozobra consists of forty poems arranged cyclically, begun by the line "Hoy como nunca" ("Today as never"), saying goodbye to Fuensanta and Jerez, and ending with the poem "Humildemente" ("Humbly"), which marks a symbolic return to his origins. Zozobra was strongly criticized by González Martínez.

In 1920 the revolt of Alvaro Obregón

Álvaro Obregón

General Álvaro Obregón Salido was the President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924. He was assassinated in 1928, shortly after winning election to another presidential term....

 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

José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos Calderón was a Mexican writer, philosopher and politician. He is one of the most influential and controversial personalities in the development of modern Mexico. His philosophy of "indigenismo" affected all aspects of Mexican sociocultural, political, and economic...

 was named minister of education, and promised a cultural renovation of the country. Velarde wrote for two journals promoted by Vasconcelos, México Moderno and El Maestro. 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.

Velarde died on June 19, 1921, soon after turning thirty-three. His death was officially attributed to pneumonia

Pneumonia

Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

, although it was speculated that syphilis

Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...

 might have been to blame. He left behind an unfinished book, El son del corazón ("The sound of the heart"), which would not be published until 1932.

His influence

After his death, at Vasconcelos' quiet urging, López Velarde was given great honors, and held up as the national poet. His work, especially "La suave patria", was presented as the ultimate expression of post-revolutionary Mexican culture. This official appropriation did not preclude others from championing his work. The poets known as the Contemporáneos

Los Contemporáneos

Los Contemporáneos can refer to a Mexican modernist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties, as well as to the literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928 to 1931...

saw Velarde, together with Tablada, as the beginning of modern Mexican poetry. Xavier Villaurrutia

Xavier Villaurrutia

Xavier Villaurrutia y González was a Mexican poet and playwright, whose most famous works are the short theatrical dramas, called Autos profanos, compiled in the work Poesía y teatro completos published in 1953....

, in particular, insisted on the centrality of Velarde in the history of Mexican poetry, and compared him to Charles Baudelaire.

The first complete study of Velarde was made by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author Allen W. Phillips in 1961. This formed the basis for a subsequent study by Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...

, included in his book Cuadrivio (1963), in which he argued the modernity of López Velarde, comparing him to Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...

, Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera.

Other critics, such as Gabriel Zaid

Gabriel Zaid

Gabriel Zaid is a Mexican writer, poet and intellectual.He was born in the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, in 1934. He studied Engineering at the Tecnológico de Monterrey....

, centered their analysis on Velarde's formative years and his strong Catholicism. On 1989, on Velarde's one hundredth birthday, Mexican author Guillermo Sheridan

Guillermo Sheridan

Guillermo Sheridan is a Mexican scholar and writer born in Mexico City. As a scholar, most of his writing deals with the history of Mexican modern poetry in books like Los Contemporáneos ayer , Un corazón adicto , México en 1932 , Poeta con Paisaje Guillermo Sheridan (August 27, 1950) is a Mexican...

 published a new biography of the poet, titled Un corazón adicto: la vida de Ramón López Velarde, which remains the most complete biography of Velarde to date.

Velarde's oeuvre, like that of José Juan Tablada, marks a moment of transition between modernism and the avant-garde

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

. His work was marked by the appearance of isms in the ambition of Hispanic authors to take a novel approach to poetic language. At the same time, his work was framed by duality, whether it be the Mexican struggle between rural traditions and the new culture of the cities, or his own struggle between asceticism and pagan sensuality.

Despite his importance, he remains a virtual unknown outside his own country.

Poetry

• 1916 - La sangre devota

• 1919 - Zozobra

• 1932 - El son del corazón -

Prose

• 1923 - El minutero

• 1952 - El don de febrero y otras prosas

• 1991 - Correspondencia con Eduardo J. Correa y otros escritos juveniles

Source

• Alfonso García Morales, López Velarde, Ramón: La sangre devota / Zozobra / El son del corazón, Madrid, Hiperión, 2001.

See also

• Mexican literature
• López Velarde's poem Suave patria on the Spanish Wikisource
• Ramón López Velarde 1888–1921 Published in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (1997)