José Martí is considered the principal founder of Spanish American Modernista poetry. Martí wrote three books of poetry: Ismaelillo (Little Ishmael, 1882), considered as the book that initiates Spanish American Modernista poetry; Versos sencillos (1891; translated as Simple Verses, 1997), which became the only other poetry book that Martí published in his lifetime; and Versos libres (Free Verses, 1913), most of whose poems he wrote in the 1880s. The three books have received extensive critical attention and are the main corpus of Martí's poetry. During the early part of his career, between 1869 and 1877, he also wrote verse dramas that were performed in his native Cuba and elsewhere.

Family, friendship, love, colonialism, exile, modernity, and national emancipation are central issues in Martí's poems. From the first compositions written as a young man in Havana to his last unfinished manuscripts in New York, Martí constructs...