Biography of Leopoldo Lugones | Argentine poet.

(Villa Maria of the dry river, Argentina, 1874 - Buenos Aires, 1938) Argentine poet. Man of vast culture, was the greatest exponent of the Argentine modernism and one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.

He spent the childhood and adolescence in his native land, and after a brief season in Santiago del Estero, settled in Buenos Aires in 1895. He worked in the newspaper El Tiempo and in 1897 founded, with José Ingenieros, La Montaña, revolutionary socialist newspaper. After some minor jobs, reached at the address of the National Library of teachers. He made several trips to Europe and lived in Paris from 1911 to 1914. He collaborated in the nation and won the national prize for literature in 1926. In 1928 he founded the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores. Their support for the coup of 1930 and subsequent disappointment that this was perhaps a deep sentimental crisis led to a depression that culminated in his suicide.

It is his particular political developments. It began as a staunch supporter of the socialist ideology, whose introduction in Argentina is due, in part, to their first political rhetoric. However, was slowly moving backwards towards more conservative positions: after a brief period of secondment to liberal thinking, leaned decidedly to the right and eventually become one of the main supporters of the Argentine fascism, especially from 1924, date in which it proclaimed that it was time "of the sword". Six years later, already established as one of the thinking heads of southern reactionary movement, he actively collaborated with the military coup of general José Félix Uriburu (September 6, 1930).

As a poet, Leopoldo Lugones broke into the Argentine literary scene with the collection of poems worlds (1893), which went virtually unnoticed. His meeting with Dario Rubén, in Buenos Aires, in 1896, was decisive to reorient the poetry of Lugones. The retoricismo of the Golden mountains (1897) soon be replaced by the ironic, quirky and imaginative tone of the twilight of the garden (1905) and Lunario sentimental (1909).

Both books breathe an atmosphere refined and decadent, full of modernist, within an aesthetic power clearly influenced by the creation of Rubén Dario languor and elegance. His style is distinguished by its creative originality, and the precision and the lyrical beauty of his verses.

From 1910 Leopoldo Lugones changed poetic record to focus on an exaltation of its land and its people (secular Odes, 1910). Subsequently, the daily business, seen an intimate routine candling, became the subject of his next poetic installment, entitled the faithful book (1912), work which was followed by other poems as the book of landscapes (1917), the Golden hours (1922) and Romancero (1924). At the end of his poetic career, Lugones was decanted by the cultivation of a narrative poetry: doorsteps poems (1927) and Romances of the Río Seco (which came to light, posthumously, in 1938).

In his role as Narrator, Lugones stood out mainly for his short stories, collected in strange forces (1906), Cassandra Tower (1919), fatal tales (1924) and strong homeland (1933). In many of these novellas, Lugones rehearsed various fantastic approaches that can be considered precursors of the best accounts of some of the largest growers of this difficult genre, as Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges (one of the biggest fans of Lugones) and Julio Cortázar.

He published also two splendid novels: a historical account of the war of independence, entitled the Gaucho war (1905), and a few esoteric meditations which, in the form of Theosophical novel, appeared under the title of the angel of the shadow (1926). In the Decade of the 1940s, the Gaucho war was a film version that became one of the main references of the Argentine cinema of his time.

Also shone Leopoldo Lugones as essayist, facet in which left some titles as relevant as the Jesuit Empire (1904), the filings of Hephaestos (1910) and History of Sarmiento (1911). Conferences on the Martín Fierro de José Hernández, which read as epic poem, gathered in El payador (1916), are without doubt a milestone in the interpretation of the Gaucho literature. In addition, he left printed testimony of the constant mutations of his political thinking, in my belligerence and the big Argentina.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas