The purpose of this article is to rescue and define the figure and work of Leon de Greiff (1895-1976), who is a relevant poet in contemporary Colombian literature, paying attention to the analysis of his writing in order to free the writer of the rigid historiographical classifications which abound in the assessments of his poetry. It is hard to typecast Leon de Greiff's work, as it is with all long-lived poets of substantial production; yet here one is allowed to observe not only the complexity of his art, but also the oversimplifications that many writers of unquestionable value are forced into when they do not corrrespond to the diagrams drawn by historians. Given the historiographical difficulties arising from the De Greiff case, which calls for rethinking the transition from the era dominated by modernism to the era dominated by the avant-garde, one seeks to deal with the verbal strategies of the author and with the theoretical component of his writing in order to indicate what themes and verbal resources are most prevalent and thus, to assess to what extent it differs from literary tradition.
