Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) was one of the first South American avant-garde poets. Born in 1893 in Santiago, Chile, Huidobro moved to Paris in 1916 where he met Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and many other Cubist poets and artists. At this time Huidobro continued to develop his theory of poetry, "creationism," which advocates writing "a poem the way nature makes a tree." Arctic Poems dates from this period.