Delmira Agustini

She is the most famous Uruguayan woman poet. Born in Montevideo in 1886, she left a remarkable body of work. Her poetry explores woman’s sexuality, and most of her poems  use  with ease an erotic language. Ahead of her time, firmly aligned with Modernism, Delmira’s best collection is Los cálices vacíos (The Empty Calyces) published in 1913.  Because of this book, inspired in Eros and sexual pleasure, she was considered a member of the Latin America avant-garde.

She married in August  1913, abandoned a month later her husband and divorced him before a year had passed,  in June 1914. Her ending was tragic: in July 1914, one month after their divorce, his ex-husband murdered her and then committed suicide.

Delmira’s poetry and her conflicted life in a very conservative milieu remain as a powerful testimony of women’s condition in Latin America by the beginning of the 20th century and beyond.