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Vicente Huidobro, dé-constructeur d’ordres et de langage, est le poète de l’utopie inaugurale par excellence. La production huidobrienne, des œuvres primitives jusqu’au grand Altazor de 1931, s’inscrit dans un acte cohérent et répété de rupture, d’innovation dans les modes d’élaboration du poème. Un parcours parmi les étapes clefs de cette démarche fondatrice nous mène jusqu’à l’aboutissement du double projet de déconstruction/reconstruction qui trouve sa pleine expression au sein même de la figure du « désastre » qu’est le personnage altazorien.

Based on a reading of the early poetry collections of Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, this article aims to show the coherence of Huidobro’s poetic practice in the founding works of his œuvre. Successive early works (1912-1925) see the steady development of Huidobro’s writing strategies and the genesis of a series of figures of the poet as disproportionately grandiose as the writing project which they represent. The “creationist” ambition of these works, an ambition which was a feature of the poet’s many manifestos of the period, is the guiding principal governing their semantic and structural architecture. This imaginary beginning or genesis is particularly embodied by the figure of Adán (Adán, 1916), the first incarnation of the Poet as creator of worlds, and precursor of the later figure, Altazor (Altazor, 1931). These early works can thus be read as a kind history, or pre-history of Huidobro’s later poetic myth.