On Great Chilean Poet
Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) was a Chilean poet, novelist, and painter who spent much of his adult life in Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona in contact with experimental and avant-garde writers. His interest in experimental French poets like Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Reverdy inspired him to compose some of his early poems in French. During his time in Europe that he also became deeply involved in radical politics.

In his 1917 "Creationist" manifestos (the first of many manifestos he would compose) Huidobro insisted on revolutionary poetry that had "neither anecdote nor description". His long poem Altazor (1931), enacts many of his Creationist theories and achieves his goal of evoking the "…world that ought to exist outside of the one that does exist."