During the first two decades of the twentieth century, two lingering poetic movements from the previous century – the late sentimental Romanticism of Julio Flórez (1867–1923) and the Parnassian modernismo modeled on the poetry of Guillermo Valencia (1873–1943) – overlapped and still dominated Colombian verse. The poets belonging to the group of Los Nuevos (The New Ones) were new in name only since they were still writing essentially in the modernista style and prevented Colombia from having any significant participation in the avant-garde-isms flourishing in Europe and the rest of Latin America after World War I. The major poets of the group of Los Nuevos included Rafael Maya (1897–1980), León de Greiff (1895–1976), Luis Vidales (1900–1990), and Jorge Zalamea (1905–69). Of the abovementioned poets, only Luis Vidales in his first book of poetry, Suenan timbres (1926, Bells Sound), and León de Greiff in Tergiversaciones (1925, Distortions) wrote verse similar in many ways to the European avant-garde without having any direct influence.

Although León de Greiff cannot be considered a true vanguard poet, he undoubtedly was one of the most important Colombian poets of all time. Like the avant-garde poets, he used neologisms but mixed them with colloquial and archaic language to create a very musical verse based on rhyme that made some critics call it symphonic and made him an ultramodernista within the gamut of post-modernista Latin American poetry. Especially in his early poetry, like Luis Carlos López (1879–1950), he mocked his own poetry with an irreverent and ironic tone about the genre that he wrote in calling his extensive books of poems mamotretos (bulky books of junk). Like the great Portuguese poet Fernando de Pessoa (1888–1935), León de Greiff wrote under various heteronyms that were projections of different aspects of his personality and also alluded to his Scandinavian family background, such as Erik Fjordson, Sergio Stepansky, Matías Aldecoa, Guillaume de Lorges, Gunnar Fromhold, Ramón Antigua, Leo LeGris, and Diego de Estuñiga among others. In one of De Greiff's most famous poems, “El relato de Sergio Stepansky” (The Story of Sergio Stepansky), the main character described and the person to whom the epigraph of the work is attributed (Erik Fjordson) are both heteronyms.