Medardo Ángel Silva

Medardo Ángel Silva was born in Guayaquil on June 8, 1898. Growing up in modest circumstances, Silva was a prodigy of musical, melancholic verse, absorbing French symbolists Verlaine and Baudelaire while working as an editor at El Telégrafo.

In 1918, he published his sole poetry collection El árbol del bien y del mal. Two days after his twenty-first birthday, on June 10, 1919, overwhelmed by melancholy and unrequited love, he shot himself in front of his beloved Rosa Amada Villegas. His farewell poem El alma en los labios, set to music by Nicasio Safadi, became Ecuador's most beloved song.