Amado Nervo

Amado Nervo (born José Amado Ruiz de Nervo y Ordaz) was a Mexican poet, novelist and diplomat, born in 1870 in Tepic, in what is now the state of Nayarit, and who died in Montevideo in 1919. He is usually grouped with the Spanish-American modernists, although the label fits him only in part: his later poetry moves away from ornament toward a quiet, mystical and melancholy tone that seeks inner calm rather than verbal brilliance. He matters as one of the most widely read lyric voices of his era in Spanish.

His childhood was shaped by loss. His father died when he was nine, leaving the family in financial difficulty. He studied in Michoacán, first at a college in Jacona and then at the seminary in Zamora, where he became interested in philosophy and mystical ideas. He briefly considered the priesthood, but need pushed him into clerical work in Tepic and later Mazatlán, where he combined a desk job with writing for a local newspaper. In 1894 he settled in Mexico City, contributed to Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera's Revista Azul, and befriended writers such as Luis G. Urbina and Rubén Darío. There he published the novel El bachiller (1895) and the poetry collections Perlas negras and Místicas, which made his name. With Jesús Valenzuela he founded the Revista Moderna in 1898.

In 1900 he went to Paris as a correspondent, and there he met Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez, whom he married and whose death in 1912 shaped the rest of his life. His grief gave rise to La amada inmóvil, published after his death. When the newspaper ended his correspondence he again lived on little, until he joined the diplomatic service in the mid-1900s as a secretary at the Mexican embassy in Madrid. The Mexican Revolution interrupted that career in 1914; after returning home in 1918 he was named minister plenipotentiary to Argentina and Uruguay. He died of uremia in Montevideo while attending a Pan-American congress. His body was taken back to Mexico with official honours.

His legacy rests chiefly on the late poetry, in which melancholy turns into serenity, and on his example as a writer who combined literature with journalism and diplomacy.