Vicente Huidobro
Quick answer: Craft lessons from Vicente Huidobro, founder of creacionismo: created images, invented words and the daring of Altazor, explained for practising poets.
Vicente Huidobro believed a poet should not describe the world but add new things to it. The Chilean writer, born into a wealthy Santiago family in 1893, sailed to Paris during the First World War, befriended the avant-garde around Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, and announced a movement of his own: creacionismo, creationism, the doctrine that a poem is a new object in the universe rather than a mirror held up to an old one.
His masterpiece, Altazor (1931), follows a figure falling through the sky in seven cantos while the language itself gradually comes apart, ending in strings of invented sound. It remains one of the boldest experiments in Spanish, and it has very practical things to teach anyone who wants their images to feel made rather than borrowed.
The self-appointed inventor
Huidobro was flamboyant, quarrelsome and rich enough to fund his own magazines, which helped his ideas travel. Writing in both Spanish and French, he published El espejo de agua in 1916, containing his manifesto-poem on the art of poetry, which famously tells poets to stop singing about the rose and instead make it bloom inside the poem.
His influence ran through the ultraísta movement in Spain and Argentina, touching the young Borges, and his rivalry with Neruda became Chilean literary legend. Beneath the showmanship sat a serious proposition: that imagination is a productive force, and the poem its factory.
Signature moves
Huidobro's technique is unusually easy to isolate, because he theorised it himself.
What you can learn from him
Run the photograph test on your own drafts. If every image in the poem could be captured with a camera, you are describing, not creating. Aim for at least one image per poem that can only exist in language.
Borrow his structural idea too: let the poem's form change in step with its emotional arc, growing more fractured or more orderly as the feeling does. And play the portmanteau game in your notebook, splicing two words from your poem's world into one. Most results will be silly. The one that is not will be unforgettable.
Where to start reading
Read the short manifesto-poem 'Arte poética' from El espejo de agua (1916) first, since it states the programme in a dozen lines. Then try Poemas árticos (1918), the opening canto of Altazor (1931), and the prose-poem Temblor de cielo. Save Altazor's final cantos for last, when you can enjoy the wreckage knowing how carefully it was arranged.
What poets can take from this
- Apply the photograph test: keep one image per poem that no camera could take.
- Let your poem's syntax loosen or tighten in step with its feeling.
- Splice two words from your draft into one and audition the result.
- State your own poetics in ten lines, then write a poem obeying it.
- Use page layout deliberately at least once, not as decoration.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in five short numbered parts in which something falls from a great height. Let each part's language be slightly more broken than the last, ending in sounds or fragments.
Questions
What is creacionismo?
It is the poetic movement Vicente Huidobro founded around 1916, holding that a poem should be a newly created object rather than a description of reality. The poet, in his phrase, works like a small god.
What is Altazor about?
Altazor (1931) follows a falling protagonist through seven cantos while the poem's own language disintegrates, ending in pure invented sound. It dramatises both spiritual crisis and the limits of language.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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