ABSTRACT
Andrés Bello was the foremost intellectual figure of his generation. He is remembered as writer of institutions and constitutions, as well as educator of an entire generation of Spanish American intellectuals and statesmen. But before becoming the towering figure that he is regarded today, Bello lived 20 years of exile in London, at a crucial time when Spanish America was fighting for its independence. From a position of personal hardship and reflecting on America's future, Bello wrote the Allocution to Poetry, an epic poem that became the foundational story of Spanish American republicanism. Bello had intended the poem as a celebratory song that inaugurates postcolonial Spanish America, yet the Allocution, richly historical and deeply sentimental, is also a product of processes of loss, rupture, and trauma, both political and personal, as Bello grapples with the potential losses that America would suffer on its path to freedom.
