José Antonio Ramos Sucre contributed essays and prose poems in the 1910s and 1920s to Caracas newspapers such as El Tiempo (The Times) and El Nuevo Diario (The New Journal) and to magazines such as Atenas (Athens), Cultura (Culture), El Cojo Ilustrado (The Cultured Limper), Renovación (Renewal), Élite (Elite), and La Universidad (The University); many of his books of poetry are collections of his periodical publications. During his lifetime he was particularly influential on young avant-garde Venezuelan poets who admired his innovative prose-poem style and surrealistic imagery; twenty years after his death his work was rediscovered by a new generation of writers.

Ramos Sucre was born on 9 June 1890 in Cumaná, a town in the Department of Sucre in Venezuela. He was one of eight children of Jerónimo Ramos, an historian and writer who came from a long line of educators, clergymen...