Vicente Huidobro

Avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro was born to an aristocratic family in Santiago, Chile. He is known as the creator and exponent of the literary movement called Creationism (Creacionismo), which combined aspects of modernism with neo-platonism and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. After studying literature at the University of Chile, he lived in Paris for about ten years, where he associated with poets and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Guillame Apollinaire, and Pierre Reverdy. Huidobro returned to Chile in the mid-1920s and worked as a newspaper editor, and he ran for the presidency of Chile, ultimately losing the campaign. His most definitive poetic work is Altazor (1931). He died in Cartagena, Chile, at the age of 56.

Translations of Huidobro's work in English include: The Relativity of Spring: 13 poems (translated by Michael Palmer and Geoffrey Young, 1976), The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro (edited by David Guss, 1981), Althazor (translated by Eliot Weinberger, 1988), and The Poet Is a Little God: Creationist Verse (translated by Jorge García-Gómez, 1990).