Born in 1915, Joaquín Pasos was a popular poet of Nicaragua until his early death, at the age of 31, in 1947, just after he had completed his great symphonic epic, The Warsong of Things. Pasos spent most of his life in Granada, the colonial center of the country. The son of a well-to-do family, he wrote songs of birth and death which connected more with the Indian culture than to his own privileged upbringing. He also wrote a popular book, Poems of a Young Man Who Has Never Traveled, concerning the places he hadn’t been, such as Norway. He claimed to know no English, but wrote eleven poems in that language.