Salomón de la Selva was born in León on March 20, 1893 and died February 5, 1959 in Paris. This poet ranks right up there on the Nicaraguan pantheon of poetry with , Carlos Martínez Rivas, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and others. He lived most of his life outside of Nicaragua. Poets are wont to form movements of literary revolution. Modernism, post-modernism, vanguard. De la Selva at one point coined the term neo-popularism for his kind of poetry. For a time he also adhered to a school of philosophy called “arielism” that proclaimed to go beyond both socialism and anti-imperialism, popular ideas among many in the early part of the 20th century.

Salomón, educated in the USA, wrote bilingually. He was friends with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, and other contemporaries and as such mingled in what were considered radical thinking circles in those days. A romantic revolutionary, he volunteered in 1917 to fight in World War I and saw that conflagration to its end.