Literary production by José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939-2014) occupies a prominent place in the Latin American literature of the second half of the twentieth century and, barely started in the new millennium, has gained increasing visibility from the recognition of the uniqueness of his creative project and its unique role in shaping cultural tradition. Pacheco was able to alternate his poetic practice with the writing of narrative, experimentation and the frequent translation of poets and dramatics, as well as the preparation of numerous anthologies and editions. In this vast and multifaceted ‘renacentist’ corpus, as Sergio Pitol described (2002: 34), he designed a plot of quotations, allusions and intertexts, which gave rise to a critical and metacrtical reflection on the cultural construction of the Latin American continent and, in particular, on the creation of a specific cultural and poetic tradition. This plot links certain high-symbolic figures and aesthetics in Mexico’s intellectual space — Alfonso Reyes, Enrique González Martínez, Federico Gamboa, Jaime Torres Bodet, Julio Torri, Octavio Paz, Ramón López Velarde, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, among others — with vertebral discussions, such as those confronting nationalisms with the cosmopolite tendencies of poets gathered in Contemporary or the vanguard pulses of Stridentism with ethnic and regionalist guards. At the same time, from the documents of the original cultures, the eastern haiku or the Biblic glossrooms to the colloquial recordings of mass media and the verbal games of Modernism, the readings and rewriting of Pacheco cover an intertextual and interdiscursive spectrum which, by virtue of their breadth and variety, indages, compulses or traces genealogías and reformulates literary lines in a continuous reflection on the functions and dysfunctions of poetic practice in the contemporary world and, consequently, on the mutability or persistence of its constituent elements. The author, the work, the reader, as well as the repertoire of gestures and practices surrounding writing and reading processes, appear in the gravitation centre of many of their poetry and trials. However, this persistent metappoetic attitude has barely started to be explored and its approach justifies research that removes and categorises the broad field of its literary references and then advances on the analysis of its textual and intertextual functions and its impact on the selection and legitimisation of poetic and cultural traditions. The articulation of the literary past with the cultural practices of the present has given rise in recent decades to an extensive and valuable bibliography (Bloom [1973] 2009; Williams [1977] 1980; SAID [1975] and Genette [1982] 1989). On the basis of some of these methodological and conceptual developments, certain epistemic nuclei of the broad poetic and experimental repertoire of Pacheco can be analysed, as well as their original contribution to the delineation of the Mexican and Latin American poetic space in recent decades. It is a poet that has explored to the limit the possibilities of colloquial records of mass media, despite the fact that this rhetoric, lexical and phonetic option raised initial concerns which resulted in a well-known controversial recorded in the last years of the 1970s (Oviedo 1976; Rodríguez Alcalá 1976, 1978; Zaid 1977). However, he also carried out a lively literary work with some of the most significant movements and figures in the poetic imaginary of last century, such as modernisation and Alfonso Reyes’ literary legacy. From the ‘Approximation to the Mexican poetry of the twentieth century’ (1965), the preface to the Anthology of Modernism [1884-1921] (1970) or the foreword to Modernist Poesia: a general anthology (1982), to cite only a few key points of its critical trajectory, the studies by Pacheco, in parallel and at the same time, in close conjunction with its lyric production, have been delineating a model of poetry and performality with a huge projection for the anchoring of contemporary literary experience. As Mario J. Valdés San Martin points out (2006: (84) although José Emilio Pacheco did not systematise his critical and theoretical writing, he has nevertheless built a poetic ARS so much or more powerful through his poetry. The tradition of elaborating lively ideas brings it into a line that started with Horacio in ancient Rome but has important predecessors in the Mexican poetry itself. In fact, a significant literature on Mexican lyric has already addressed some partial aspects of this topic, although it has also made clear the need to deepen and systematise the analysis of the body of intertextual references of Pacheco and its structure with the author’s poetic since it intersects with the critical currents which, in recent decades, have made substantial contributions to tackling the complex articulation between aesthetic experience, poetic language and cultural tradition. Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences