Manuel Gutierrez Najera Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Manuel Gutierrez Najera

Throughout his twenty-year career as a journalist, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera published approximately 1,500 crónicas (journalistic articles) and wrote more than 200 poems. He is recognized as one of Mexico's most important poets, one who was greatly admired and respected by his peers. Though Gutiérrez Nájera never traveled beyond his native Mexico, he was greatly influenced by French literature and culture. Rather than merely copying French literature, however, he developed a style that is a mixture of Hispanic and foreign traditions. Despite the fact that his poetic works were never collected into a volume during his lifetime, the many poems he published in the daily press are considered by critics to be some of the first examples of Modernista poetry in Latin America. Modernismo is an artistic movement dating from the end of the nineteenth century that was inspired by French literature but developed into a new art form that in its early manifestations celebrated the aesthetic values of art for art's sake.

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