Ramón López Velarde

López Velarde was a provincial lawyer from Zacatecas who wrote about small towns, Sunday mass, a first love who died young, and the particular melancholy of a country that had just torn itself apart in revolution. His language mixed the liturgical with the erotic and the plainly domestic in a way nobody in Spanish had quite done, and younger poets treated him as the point where Mexican poetry became modern.

In 1921 the government asked him for a patriotic poem for the centenary of independence. He produced La suave Patria, which declines the expected grandeur: the country in it is not heroic but intimate and slightly comic, made of maize, thunderstorms, a girl's shawl and the smell of a mine. It is recited in Mexican schools to this day. Weeks after finishing it he caught pneumonia — the story is that he walked home at night in the rain rather than take a cab — and died at thirty-three. His remains were moved in 1963 to the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons in Mexico City.