Cernuda spent his first year in Mexico City in a rented apartment in the city center. Then, towards the end of 1953, he moved to Concha Méndez’s house on Tres Cruces St, Coyoacán. The following year, with the help of Octavio Paz, who had just returned from Paris, Cernuda got both a part-time job teaching at the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México, and a grant from El Colegio de México that allowed him to dedicate himself to literary research.

The first outcome of this research was his controversial book Estudios sobre la poesía española contemporánea, published in Madrid, in 1957. It provoked an uproar in the Spanish literary establishment because it questioned the consensus about Spanish contemporary poetry, and, above all, made a very severe criticism of the works of poets such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas.

The grant also enabled him to study English poets such as Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Hopkins; studies from which he managed to publish 1958 a book entitled Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa (siglo XIX). Mexican critics received the book with coldness and indifference.

If 1958 was an important year for Cernuda, especially due to the publication of La realidad y el deseo’s third edition in the Fondo de Cultura Económica. To this extended and corrected version of the book, he added the poems from Como quien espera el alba, Vivir sin estar viviendo and Con las horas contadas (which included the short series Poemas para un cuerpo). In addition, Cernuda decided to include the first poems of a new collection that would eventually be called Desolación de la Quimera. In Mexico, critics praised the book and poets such as Octavio Paz, Tomás Segovia, and José Emilio Pacheco even considered Cernuda an undisputed master of contemporary poetry. Moreover, in Spain, young poets like José Ángel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and Francisco Brines began to vindicate the exiled poet's work.

Manuel Altolaguirre died in in a car accident in Spain, in 1959. As a posthumous tribute, Cernuda edited Altolaguirre´s collected poems in 1960, under the title Poesía completa. That same year he published Poesía y literatura, an excellent collection of literary essays mostly written during his exile in Great Britain.

Meanwhile, Cernuda was getting used to family life in Coyoacán with Concha Méndez, her daughter Paloma and her son-in-law, Manuel Ulacia, and later with her grandchildren Manuel, Luis, Paloma, and Isabel Ulacia Altolaguirre. The ample garden offered Cernuda the peace needed for a sober and simple life. He went to the movies a couple of times a week and took Paloma´s children to and from school. He expressed the great love he felt for those children in his correspondence and in his poetry. He wrote the poem “Animula, vagula, blandula” for Luis and “Hablando con Manona” for Paloma. Manuel considered “Niño tras un cristal” dedicated to him, as he mentioned it in his own beautiful Origami para un día de lluvia. In short, it was not all haughtiness and disdain in the life of Luis Cernuda.