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Xavier Villaurrutia is known, above all, for his poetry and his membership of the Contemporáneos group. However, he was also the author of an important body of critical work which has been overshadowed by the prominence of his poetry. His readings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Ramón López Velarde, which were controversial in their time, have come to be key to the critical study of both authors and Villaurrutian traces are discernible in the later works of José Luis Martínez and Octavio Paz, who studied under him. It is also worth noting his role as an anthologist of modern Mexican poetry and modern Spanish poetry in the emblematic journalLaurel, whose prologue includes an interpretation of Spanish modernism acclaimed by Juan Ramón Jiménez. This interpretation coincides with that laid out by Federico de Onís in hisAntología de la poesía española e hispanoamericana(1934). This article discusses those contributions in relation to the politically polemical moment in which they were written; it evaluates them and places them in the Mexican critical tradition and it explains how and why Villaurrutia outlined a concept of the ‘Mexican’, its literary expression and its representative names—a concept that remains relevant to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]