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, even though he wrote copiously on the imperial hopes of the United States in the Spanish-speaking hemisphere. While Martí remained focused on Cuba no matter where he was throughout the Americas and in exile in Key West and New York, Darío wandered the globe. Darío’s itinerant agenda as a diplomat, journalist, and traveler brought him to distant regions—distant at least for a citizen of a small, impoverished nation such as Nicaragua.

Darío was comfortable with the effort behind Modernismo, although he grew suspicious of the rubric itself. In his eyes the movement should have represented progress in a myriad of areas, from science to technology, from economics to education. He envisioned—and with enormous enthusiasm—a transition for the Americas from an awkward, dependent region still lingering in its mediocrity, stuck in a dogmatic tradition, and blindly loyal to a feudal Spain, to a fully cosmopolitan society attuned to the principles and fashions of the West. This, for him, was the announcement of a new type of life. This Modernismo, he stated, “is beginning to give us a place apart, a place that is independent.” It must be kept in mind that with the exception of the luminous seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz and an improbably small cadre of americanistas, the number of authors from the New World that were recognized at all in Spain was insignificant. So for Darío and his peers, recognition in Madrid was important, since it meant legitimacy: if the former colonial power could validate their work, the status of that work was automatically more solid, less ethereal.

There was much debate in Spain at the time about the accuracy of describing the overall effort as Modernismo and about the ultimate endurance of the work. Juan Valera, in a column called “American Letters” for the literary supplement of the newspaper El Imparcial, expressed his enthusiasm. He remarked on Darío’s French tone and the highly polished Spanish of the pieces. Valera eventually wrote to Darío: “None of the men of letters of the Peninsula that I have known with more cosmopolitan spirit, and that have resided for a longer time in France, and that have spoken French and other foreign languages better, have ever seemed to me so deeply filled with the spirit of France as you, sir: not Galiano, not Eugenio de Ochoa, not Miguel de los Santos Alvarez.” Valera added a little later: “It seems that here, a Nicaraguan author who never set foot out of Nicaragua except to go to Chile, and who is an author so à la mode de Paris and with such ‘chic’ and distinction, has been able to anticipate fashion and even modify and impose it.”

 

In 1890, a couple of years after Azul . . . was published, a coup d’etat in Nicaragua forced Darío to move to Guatemala, then to El Salvador. In 1891, his son Rubén Darío Contreras was born in Costa Rica. In 1892 he also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain, a country with which he had an emotional relationship described in the chronicles and literary portraits of España contemporánea (Contemporary Spain, 1901).