Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection and translation of Walt Whitman's poetry, titled simply Walt Whitman: Poemas, was an extremely influential text for hispanophone readers—the first substantial collection of Whitman poems in Spanish. Scholars have identified Vasseur's translation as instrumental in accelerating Latin American poetry's shedding of its modernista tendencies in favor of franker, often more explicitly socially and politically engaged verse. Republished frequently throughout the period of extraordinary historical and aesthetic change bounded by 1912 and 1951, Poemas played a crucial role in keeping both Whitman and Vasseur in the public eye. Of Vasseur's prefaces to the various editions of the work, that to the sixth edition is the longest and most elaborate declaration of his sense of Whitman's importance to international letters.