Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Online Free PDF Page A

misunderstood and rejected. This haughty attitude toward art was typical in the twilight of the nineteenth century. Among the Modernistas in Latin America, it sometimes found itself mixed with politics. That is the case of the Cuban José Martí, of course, and, as I will discuss later, also with Darío, although to a far lesser extent.
    The term Modernism—in spite of the way Paz, or better, his translators, and others use it—should not be confused with its Spanish version, Modernismo . As it turns out, the meaning of the words in the two languages is diametrically different, identifying trends that belong to radically divergent cultural landscapes. (Hence my use, throughout, of the italicized Spanish.) “Modernism” is the rubric used in Europe and the United States to designate the artistic generation between the world wars (the dates range from approximately 1914 to the mid-fifties), personified by, among others, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Their pursuit was aesthetic in nature as well as political and linguistic. They believed that the patterns of life at the end of the Industrial Revolution, as they applied to art and philosophy, were outmoded and needed to be revitalized, sometimes by “renewing” old forms, genres, authors. Thus, in the area of literature, the practitioners of Modernism sought to invigorate the page by making language less rigid, more flexible. They embraced concepts such as “stream of consciousness” in order to portray characters in nontraditional ways—from inside out, so to speak. All of this makes the Modernists in Europe closer to what are called the Vanguardistas of Latin America (e.g., César Vallejo, et al.).
    In contrast, the Modernistas in Latin America appeared earlier on the cultural map. Their revolution occurred roughly between 1885 and 1915 (or, with Darío’s death, a year later) and although it spilled into other artistic areas, its central tenets apply to literature almost exclusively, and to poetry most vividly. The writers of the Modernista movement are much closer in spirit to the Romantics in Europe, whose poetic search is also for unity and harmony in the universe at large. Latin America never had a Romantic movement per se; indeed, it skipped it, because by the time that particular aesthetics arrived on this side of the Atlantic the region was consumed with ideas of independence and revolution. Politics mingled inextricably with daily affairs and there was no time to be concerned with that sublime and tragic sense of life. But by the end of the nineteenth century, nations such as Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia had become autonomous, and they were focused on finding their own collective identity. Others, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, would be at the junction of the Spanish-America War of 1898, through which Spain lost its colonies in the Caribbean Basin and the region entered the orbit of a new imperial power, the United States. Thus, Modernismo is, in essence, a loose Latin American version of Romanticism, infused with an understanding of language and politics that is influenced by global events at the time and by post-Romantic artistic movements in Europe such as Symbolism and Parnassianism, which embraced an esoteric, somewhat hermetic conception of art. The poet, in the view of these movements, connected with archetypes embedded in the cultural consciousness. Aside from Darío, the movement included Martí, Colombian José Asunción Silva, Mexican Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and Argentine Leopoldo Lugones. Through his combination of literature and essays, Martí, like Darío, was an assiduous correspondent to newspapers such as La Nación in Buenos Aires, and his readers soon made him an idol—and, with his death on the battlefield in 1895 in the struggle for Cuban independence, a martyr as well. But while these two authors have much in common, they are also quite different. Darío, for one thing, is an aesthete,