The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro

Virtually unknown in the United States, Huidobro was one of the most important innovators in Latin America poetry of the early twentieth century and an important theoretician of the new art. He lived in Europe for many years, specifically in Paris from 1916 to 1926, where he wrote poetry in French and participated in French poetic movements. He proclaimed himself the inventor of the school that he called Creationism, which he considered the foundation of a new way of conceiving art. For Huidobro the mission of the poet was the creation of new poetic realities. Art was totally free and the poem was free of both its poet-creator and the circumstances in which it was created. Huidobro tended to exaggerate and became a center of polemics, but he was one of the first to announce such important avant-garde concepts. His creative work is startling because of the novelty of the metaphors and the formal and verbal experimentation.

020