Chocano, José Santos

Chocano, José Santos hōsāˈ sänˈtōs chōkäˈnō [key], 1875–1934, Peruvian poet and one of the leaders of modernismo. During a life of Latin-American wandering, Chocano was closely linked both to brutal dictatorships and idealist revolutionaries. His most popular volume, Alma América [the soul of America] (1906) led Rubén Darío, the greatest of the modernistas, to develop native themes. Well-known collections of his poetry are Fiat Lux (1908) and Primicias de oro de Indias [first fruits of gold from the Indies] (1934). Having killed a political enemy, the writer Edwin Elmore, Chocano moved to Chile where he was himself murdered by a lunatic.

See his collected poems, tr. by E. Underwood (1935).

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