Bartolome Hidalgo (Montevideo, 1788 - Moron, Buenos Aires Province, 1822) is the first poet to have utilized the Spanish language to capture the qualities of gaucho speech His writings, comprising a series of lyrical, narrative and dialogic texts about current political concerns of the second and third decades of the 19th century in both margins of the Rio de la Plata, have been recognized by the most respected literary critics of the region -Sarmiento, Mitre, Leguizamon, Rojas, Falcao Espalter, Borges- as the initiation of this most original genre, and Hidalgo, consequently, the first gauchesco poet. Hidalgo"s works are still filled with unknowns for the modern reader, since they were almost always published anonymously and thus present a double layer of attribution difficulty: a) discerning what Hidalgo did and did not write himself, and b) deciding who might have written the texts generally believed not to be his. This critical edition of the Complete Poetic Works of Bartolome...