This movement emerged in Latin America between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the founder and main exponent in the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, who undertook a huge task of renewing the resources of poetry, which affected from the verse to metaphor, through the cadence and vocabulary. Dario also caused a revolution in the subject of literature with a taste for the exotic, by the work of the authors of the Spanish Baroque, including Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo, and certain stages of history, as the Middle Ages European imperial China and the Inca and Aztec civilizations.
Among the writers who have joined the Mexican modernism may be mentioned Amado Nervo and Salvador Diaz Miron, the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones, the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig and Jose Enrique Rodo, in addition to the Spanish Ramón del Valle-Inclán and the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado .
Critics believe that the first work of modernism is Blue, published by Ruben Dario in 1888, which was followed and among other of his writings.