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Vicente Huidobro, a Chilean author who published five excellent works in his native country between the years 1911 and 1916, moved to France at the end of 1916 and became part of the emergent Avant-Garde in Paris. He co-founded and collaborated with Pierre Reverdy in Nord-Sud, a journal that embraced artists of what later would be known as literary Cubism.
In 1920, a year after the dissolution of Nord-Sud, Huidobro was accused of imitating his colleague, the poet Pierre Reverdy. Enrique Gomez Carrillo, a Guatemalan writer, stated in the El Cosmópolis of Madrid (June, 1920) that Huidobro copied Reverdy's style and that he deliberately pre-dated his work The Water Mirror (1916). The aim of Huidobro for committing such deception, according to Gomez Carrillo, was to establish himself as the first poet to achieve the aesthetic ambitions shared by the members of Nord-Sud: The production of independent images; the objective was to contest previous practices such as symbolism's or realism's manner of constructing imagery. This indictment against Huidobro created a dispute, first, between Huidobro and Gómez Carrillo and, later, between supporters of Huidobro and supporters of the accuser. Works with reference to the issue continue to appear up to this day. Nevertheless, their principles orbit around the perspective of adherents or detractors of Huidobro, without ever presenting a comparative inquiry that includes the actual poetry of both individuals. Vicente Huidobro and Pierre Reverdy in the Works revises the quarrel from an objective standpoint and includes an inquiry into concrete aesthetic pieces by both authors. The outcome is decisive: There was no imitation and Huidobro's The Water Mirror undeniably appeared in 1916.
There were, however, points of concurrence not only between Huidobro and Reverdy, but between Huidobro and the Avant-Garde in general. The thesis studies those correlations by means of a personal critical framework called the theory of acquisition. This method also assists in understanding Huidobro's literary Creationism in connection to the European movements and demolishes long standing reservations concerning the poet's creativity.