The poetic movement that was Spanish American modernismo ran from the early 1880s to 1916: it expressed the desire both to join universal literature—aesthetic modernity—and to break colonial ties with Spanish belles lettres. The new translations in this bilingual anthology, many of them first translations, present eighteen modernista poets from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay. This volume in the MLA series Texts and Translations is designed to provide the student of Spanish American literature with work not easily accessible in Spanish and English and to introduce modernismo, an often misunderstood movement, to a wider audience.