Since the 1977 publication of Arte de Morir, his first full-length collection of poems, Oscar Hahn (b. 1938, Chile) has been recognized as a major poet.
In a lengthy essay the important Chilean postmodernist Enrique Lihn hailed Hahn as "the premiere poet of his generation," and responding to that same volume, the critic Graciela Palau de Nemes called Hahn "the most important poet of the fantastic in Spanish-American letters." His second major collection, Mal de Amor (1981), was taken off library shelves and removed from bookstores by the military junta in Chile a month after its publication, but reissued in an expanded edition five years later. In recent years Hahn has had editions of his collected poems published in Chile, Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, Greece, and other countries. He is currently a Professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa.
