Nor does his taste for rhythmic innovation disappear; on the contrary, these innovations are surer and more daring.” Cantos de vida y esperanza includes poems to Cervantes and Goya, songs to melancholy, and more than sixty other poems, his most prolific production ever. The book also reflects Darío’s political transformation at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The struggle shook him to the core. He denounced the United States in a series of poems and articles written for various periodicals. Still, he perceived the United States—or better, he misunderstood it—as a godless empire whose hemispheric fortune was on the rise. He simultaneously admired and detested it, thinking that the best solution for a hemispheric harmony was a neighborly pact between north and south. His poem to Theodore Roosevelt includes one of the most famous words Darío ever wrote: the monosyllabic no. This might sound preposterous; after all, how often does the word appear in his oeuvre? Thousands of times, no doubt. But its position in the poem “To Roosevelt” is exemplary and has been read as a political statement. Herein a fragment:

 

You’re arrogant and you’re strong, exemplary of your race;
you’re cultivated, you’re skilled, you stand opposed to Tolstoy.
You’re a tamer of horses, you’re a killer of tigers,
you’re like some Alexander mixed with Nebuchadnezzar.
(You must be the Energy Professor
as the crazies today might put it)

 

You think that life is one big fire,
that progress is just eruption,
that wherever you put bullets,
you put the future, too.

 


No.

 

The U.S. is a country that is powerful and strong.
When the giant yawns and stretches, the earth feels a tremor
rippling through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you shout, the sound you make is a lion’s roar.
Hugo once said this to Grant: “You possess the stars.”
(The Argentine sun at dawn gives off hardly any light;
and the Chilean star is rising higher . . . ) You’re so rich,
you join the cult to Hercules with the cult to Mammon.
And lighting the broad straight path that leads to easy conquests,
Lady Liberty raises her torch in New York City.

 

But our own America, which had plenty of poets
even from the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl,
and which retained the footprints from the feet of Great Bacchus,
and, over the course of time, learned the Panic alphabet:
it sought advice from the stars, and knew of Atlantis,
whose name was a legacy, resonating in Plato.
Even from the most remote moments in its boundless life,
it has lived by light and fire, by fragrances and by love:
America of the great Moctezuma and Inca,
America redolent of Christopher Columbus,
Catholic America and Spanish America,
the place where once long ago the noble Cuátemoc said,
“I’m not on a bed of roses!” Yes, that America,
trembling from its hurricanes and surviving on its Love . . .
It lives with you, with your Saxon eyes and barbaric souls.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates; it’s the daughter of the Sun.
Be careful. Spanish America is alive and well!
There are myriad loose cubs now from the Spanish Lion.
Roosevelt, you’d need to be transfigured by God himself
into the dire Rifleman and the powerful Hunter
to finally capture us in your talons of iron.

 

This, clearly, is a defiant ideological poem. But it also strikes a religious chord, for Darío ends it by telling Roosevelt: “And you think you have it all, but one thing is missing: God!” In this sense it showcases a view of the United States that is nearsighted: the Nicaraguan sees Latin America as a site where faith is essential, unlike its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, which he portrays, mistakenly, as less devout.