Delmira Agustini

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) was a Uruguayan poet. Supported in her education and ambition by her cultivated, bourgeois family, and admired by her male counterparts within Hispanic modernismo—including Rubén Darío (1867-1916), who would write the foreword to her third poetry collection,  Los cálices vacíos—Agustini’s unbridled, erotic verse not only made her a celebrated author in early twentieth century Montevideo, but also a figure of controversy when she became the country’s first divorcee shortly after her 1913 wedding. Gunned down by her ex-husband a year later, her untimely death catapulted her fame to nigh mythical proportions.