Felipe was born in Tábara, Zamora, Spain, while his parents were travelling. His father was a public notary and comfortably off. His family settled in Santander. In early adulthood Felipe would study Pharmacology and go into business as a pharmacist, ostensibly to please his father. However, literature exerted a stronger pull on him and he eloped with an itinerant theatre troupe. As a result, he was charged with fraud, due to the bankruptcy caused by dereliction of his business responsibilities, and spent two years in jail. On his release from custody, he started writing for literary reviews and later on his first books were published. He is one of Spain's best twentieth-century poets, and scholars have included him alongside Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Perdo Salinas, and Vicente Aleixandre among the members of Generation of 1927.
His poetry touched upon the difficult Spanish situation and the feeling that history would repeat itself for the worst. His use of reiteration and repetition, the prominence of Biblical motifs, and the Hebrew flavour to (Antología rota, 1947) inspired comparisons with the work of Walt Whitman. His poetry is also characterized by the tropes of Modernismo and the Vanguardismo (Drop a star, 1933). He wrote in free verse.
He lived the last decades of his life in Mexico, where he became a central figure among post-civil-war Spanish exiles. There he met actress and singer Sara Montiel, for whom he felt a great attraction. He died in Mexico City on 17 September 1968.
Seven of Leon Felipe's poems were found in a notebook that Che Guevara was carrying when he was captured by the Bolivian Army and the CIA.
