Dario is the leader of a school, but other poets, as great as he, may be regarded as the precursors of literary "modernism": José Asunción Silva, Leopoldo Lugones, Guillermo Valencia, Rufino Blanco Fombana--the latter, like Almafuerte, Chocano, and the Lugones of the "Hills of Gold," seeks to be the poet of the new America. These writers aim at an American art, an art free from rhetorical _clichés_, innocent of imitation, of declamation, of affected sensibility. Who shall say whether the revolt of this younger generation will lead it? Angel de Estrada is the poet of the exotic in his _Alma nomade_; Guillermo Valencia, as great as Dario in the exegesis of the legends of Greece and the love of things Hellenic, has a universal curiosity and an astonishingly versatile lyrical capacity. Rufino Blanco Fombana has sung of sensual passion, the hatred of tyrants, and the glories of Bolivar; he has remodelled the lyric, has written verses as finely chiselled as the gems of the Greek anthology, and sonorous lines in which we hear a call to action and to victory. Chocano aspires to become the poet of America: grandiloquent, sonorous, rich in imagery. Lugones is a much admired author of sentimental verse, audacious as to form and vocabulary. José Asuncion Silva was noted for his melancholy, languorous verse: he was a forerunner, a master, like Dario. Ricardo Jaimes Freire employs the more audacious metres; Amado Nervo, equally radical in his love of new forms, exhibits a modernism touched by a breath of Buddhistic pantheism, and sings of "Sister Water" like a modern St. Francis.