Jose Santos Chocano
Jose Santos Chocano Gastanodi was a Peruvian poet who proclaimed himself "The Singer of America, Autochthonous and Savage"" . Now neglected, largely for the bombastic tone of his poems, in the early twentieth century his fame stretched through the continent and even to Madrid and Paris. His best-known collection is the 1906 Alma America, which opened with a dedicatory poem addressed to Alfonso XIII of Spain that cast the collection as the rediscovery of Latin America through verse; elsewhere in the collection, Chocano declared himself a "Columbus of poetry" ("un Colon del verso"). In 1908 he revised and republished his early poetry under the title Fiat Lux. Much of his poetry plays on an image of the poet as a happily hybrid subject, bringing together indigenous and Spanish legacies.
Chocano's life, like his poetry, covered a wide range of places and times, and offers a strange blend of the anachronistic and the modern. After a short term in jail for political activism, he relocated to Madrid in the early 1900s, where he associated with prominent Spanish and Latin American intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, and Ruben Dario. His 1906 poetry collection, Alma America, was offered and taken as a "New World" corrective to the purportedly cosmopolitan modernismo of Dario. Forced to flee Spain shortly thereafter due to allegations of financial malfeasance, Chocano spent the next decade and a half traveling through Latin and Central America, where he befriended an astonishing variety of political figures from different points on the ideological spectrum -- Pancho Villa in Mexico, Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala, even Woodrow Wilson in the USA, with whom he struck up a correspondence.
After the coup which desposed Estrada Cabrera in 1920, Chocano was briefly imprisoned, and subsequently returned to Peru, where he became associated with President Augusto B. Leguia. On November 5, 1922, Chocano was crowned "Poet of America" in a ceremony featuring Leguia himself, various ministers, delegates from all the provinces of Peru, and a number of young and established writers. He was therefore in the curious position of being praised by the avant-garde and the establishment alike.
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