This was the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas, and Darío was on the verge of replicating, at the aesthetic level, Simón Bolívar’s effort to achieve continental independence from Spain. Over time he met several Spanish writers with whom he established a lasting friendship; some of them, including Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Antonio and Manuel Machado, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, later to win the Nobel Prize for literature, became supporters or wrote prologues for his books. It was also at this time that Rafaela Contreras Cañas died. Shortly after, Darío married his second wife, Rosario Murillo.

Darío finally traveled to Paris in the early 1890s. There he at last met one of his idols, Paul Verlaine, and, on a trip to New York, he forged a friendship with Martí. Three years later, in 1896, now known as the annus mirabilis in Darío’s career, two of his most important books, Los raros (The Misfits) and Prosas profanas y otros poemas (Profane Prose and Other Poems), were published by Imprenta Pablo E. Coni, their publication costs paid by Carlos Vega Belgrano, editor of Argentina’s El Tiempo, a newspaper for which Darío regularly wrote. These two efforts are fascinating in that they push Darío’s aesthetic views to new dimensions. Los raros, published in Argentina, includes profiles of characters Darío is attracted to (Poe, Verlaine, Rachilde, Villiers de Lisle d’Adam, et al.). Their appeal is to be found in the desire they nurture to not adapt their needs to society, to break rules, to rebel. In Prosas profanas, on the other hand, the term “profane” is crucial: Darío strove for a poetics akin to his age, connected to Catholicism but seeking alternative modes of faith. He looked toward mythology, and he also looked toward pre-Columbian history. His memoir Historia de mis libros (The Story of My Books), serialized in Buenos Aires’s La Nación in 1913, along with his autobiography, allow us to understand Darío’s own perception of his poetic mission. In that first book, he writes: “[In] all the Spanish Americas, no one held any end or object for poetry save the celebration of native glories, the events of Independence, the American nature: an eternal hymn to Junín, an endless ode to the agriculture of the torrid zone, and stirring patriotic songs. I did not deny that there was a great treasure trove of poetry in our prehistoric times, in the Conquest, and even in the colony, but with our subsequent social and political state had come intellectual dwarfism and historical periods more suitable for the blood-dripping penny dreadful than the noble canto. Yet I added: ‘Buenos Aires—cosmopolis! And tomorrow!’ The proof of this prophecy can be found in my recent ‘Canto to Argentina.’ ”

This volume again contains classical examples of Darío’s aesthetics, including a sonatina about a princess, an early poem about a swan, and a couple of poems that might well be considered his ars poetica: “Love Your Rhythm” and “I’m Hunting a Form.” In the former, Darío, in a self-referential voice, maps out his poetic pursuit, offering a vision of the poet as a medium between the earthly and celestial spheres. The poem includes this stanza:

 

The celestial oneness you surely are
will make worlds sprout in you that are diverse,
and if your meters start to sound dispersed,
use Pythagoras to unite your stars.

 

The sonnet “I’m Hunting a Form,” on the other hand, is the most representative of Darío’s confessional pieces. It mixes classical and mythical ingredients, from the Venus de Milo to Sleeping Beauty, concluding with the swan, specifically its question mark-shaped neck, as a symbol of doubt. This is a memorable disquisition on the evasiveness and vulnerability of poetry. The last two stanzas read:

 

I can only find words that never seem to stay,
pieces of a song from a flute, which slip away,
the ship of those dreams, which drift aimlessly in space.

 

And under my Sleeping Beauty’s open window,
the soft and steady crying of the fountain’s flow,
and the swan’s great white neck, with its questions, its grace.

 

On the other hand, Los raros is, in my estimation, one of Darío’s most bizarre, most daring works. Mexican critic Jaime Torres Bodet once said that the book contains portraits of artists better known for their proclivity toward the uncanny than for their authentic genius, and more apt to produce episodic—that is, forgettable—art than art that is likely to endure throughout the ages. But a mere list of those discussed by Darío instantaneously proves the thesis wrong: Martí, Poe (who, according to Dario, “passed his life, one might say, under the floating influence of a strange mystery”), Ibsen, Verlaine, Léon Bloy, and Isadora Duncan, to name only a handful. Darío does not attempt to deliver a balanced view. Instead, he is interested in an open, confessed display of subjectivity. His portraits are about exceptional natures, about freedom in art, about talents whose life, like Darío’s, is spent “hunting a form that my style can barely trace.” Needless to say, Darío’s choice of a subject for a book was, in a way, a self-justification. After all, he, too, was un raro, an eccentric who had a huge influence on literature and was recognized as something of a genius. This, by the way, wasn’t the first time he had embraced a tangential approach to writing: Darío was often known to choose a theme in order to talk about himself and his place in society, the place of his poetry in society, and the place of the artist in society. The argument in Los raros is that those who rebel, those who assert their difference, are those whom, in the long run, we most prize.

It should be added that at this time Darío also started to serialize a novel called El hombre de oro (Man of Gold), which was influenced by Flaubert’s Salambó. As for Whitman, who also tried his luck at writing a novel, for Darío the excursion was not a high point in his career: the volume is more derivative than anything else he ever did, abstruse, distracted. He clearly did not have a talent for long fictional narratives.