José Asunción Silva published only a few poems and prose pieces in his lifetime, most of them in journals and newspapers. His collected works amount to no more than 130 poems, 11 prose pieces, and a novel. Yet, he is arguably the most renowned Colombian poet and, together with José Martí and Rubén Darío, one of the three most important voices of Latin American Modernismo. In many ways, as Héctor H. Orjuela points out, Silva was the epitome of the modernist writer: torn between business and art to the point that the dilemma might have driven him to commit suicide. So little is known, however, not only about what made him kill himself so young but also about his private life that it has become a common practice among his biographers to quote José Juan Tablada's early remark...