The author of short stories, novels, essays, and journalism, Leopoldo Lugones is best known as Argentina’s most famous modernista writer, with several volumes of influential and highly varied poetry that ultimately led to an exhaustion of modernista verse. His other major contributions to Argentine literature include to the genre of fantastic fiction and his essays on Argentine identity and literary history. In the latter, he located the marginalized figure of the gaucho as a romantic origin for a national culture. Lugones’ legacy has been marked by the increasingly nationalist-fascist bent of his poetry and essays, beginning in the 1920s. However, the legacy of his earlier, audacious poetic experiments on the future poetic movements of the avant-gardes persist.