Poems by Leopoldo Lugones

Leopoldo Lugones’ first book of poems is Las montañas del oro, from 1897, with measured and free verses, and modernist poetic prose. He later published Los crepúsculos del jardín (1905) and Lunario sentimental (1909), all influenced by Rubén Darío. Secular Odes (1910), was a change in his style, which exalts the Argentine riches inspired by Virgil.
His poetry becomes intimate and everyday in The Faithful Book (1912), The Book of Landscapes (1917) and The Golden Hours (1922). While Romancero (1922), Poemas solariegos (1927) and the posthumous Romances del Río Seco are more narrative. This anthology contains poems from all but the last of the books cited above.

Lugones was born on June 13, 1874. He ended his life on February 18, 1938, in San Fernando, ingesting a mixture of cyanide and whiskey. Between these two dates runs the work of Lugones, considered by Borges as one of the greatest literary adventures in Spanish.
A man of vast culture, he was the greatest exponent of Argentine modernism and one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his biography of Leopoldo Lugones, defined with special intensity the suicide of the founder of the Argentine Society of Writers.

“To say that the first writer of our Republic has died, to say that the writer of our language has died, is to say the strict truth and is to say very little.”