Alfonso Reyes

[First Paragraph] In many senses, Alfonso Reyes epitomizes the peculiarly Latin American phenomenon of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pensador or ‘thinker’, a title that overlaps with the European or American, critical intellectual but is more likely to be associated with aesthetic production, often in combination with a diplomatic role. It is in this sense or, perhaps sometimes, foremost as a poet, that Reyes is most commonly known in his native Mexico. To sum up his vast and varied body of work, aside from a poet and diplomat, Reyes was a journalist, a writer of short fiction, a translator and, above all else, a gifted essayist who covered an array of topics including – but not limited to – the classics, philology, aesthetics, modern Latin American and European literature, philosophy and geography. Often referred to by the pseudonym ‘El Regiomontano Universal’ (‘the universal man from Monterrey’), Reyes is one of the most significant and esteemed literary figures of modern Mexico and a writer of great influence at home, throughout Latin America and in Spain. Reyes’ legacy in Mexico is also complex and disputed, often precisely because of his famed ‘universalist’ character, a topic that Ignacio Sánchez Prado discusses in a recent article (2013).