Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable academic industry. Hundreds of book-length studies and thousands of monographs have been written by scholars on Darío. He has been a lightning rod for the Modernista movement that swept the intellectual world of Latin America as the nineteenth century came to a close. (It is no secret that most of these academic examinations tend to be innocuous, jingoistic, and altogether inundated by a hygienic theoretical jargon that specializes in killing the power of poetry. At times one feels that these exercises do little to explain his legacy.) Scholars have delved into the minutiae of his biography and his oeuvre, exploring every imaginable aspect of it from a myriad of perspectives, from the sociological to the political, from the philosophical to the semantic. Special emphasis has been placed on Darío’s links to figures in world literature, with detailed concentration on his borrowings from the French intellectual orbit.

Beyond university circles, however, Darío’s posterity is nothing if not contested, and often the assessment of Darío’s legacy is so passionate as to be belligerent. Throughout his life not only was he often attacked for being either too daring or too imitative of foreign models, but his poetic revolution was also misunderstood. For some critics, such as philologist Raimundo Lida, Darío was not only the most admirable of all the Modernista poets but also one of the great modern Latin-American poets. And in an obituary published in 1916, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the Dominican literary critic who delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1940-41, was the first to equate Darío with Spain’s two major Golden Age poets, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. Federico García Lorca, in a conversation with Pablo Neruda at the PEN Club in Buenos Aires in 1933, argued, lyrically, that Darío “gave us the murmur of the forest in an adjective, and as masterful as Fray Luis de Granada, he made zodiacal signs out of the lemon tree, the hoof of a stag, and mollusks filled with terror and infinity. He launched us on the sea with frigates and shadows in our eyes, and built an enormous promenade of gin over the grayest afternoon the sky has ever known, and greeted the southwest wind as a friend, all heart like a Romantic poet, and put his hand on the Corinthian capital of all epochs with a sad, ironic doubt.” Pablo Neruda responded: Darío’s “red name deserves to be remembered, along with his essential tendencies, his terrible heartaches, his incandescent uncertainties, his descent into the hospitals of hell, his ascent to the castles of fame, his attributes as a great poet, now and forever undeniable.” Neruda added: “Federico García Lorca, a Spaniard, and I, a Chilean, dedicate the honors bestowed on us today to that great shadow who sang more loftily than ourselves, and who saluted, in a new voice, the Argentine soil that we now tread.”

But for others less diplomatic (and more racist, perhaps) in their judgment, such as Oxford don C. M. Bowra, Darío was a disappointing poet. Bowra compared the Nicaraguan unfavorably to W. B. Yeats, believing that Darío suffered from “his untutored simplicity and his complete lack of irony.” Bowra added: “We must remember that he was a stranger from an underdeveloped land, that he had Indian blood in his veins and lacked the complexity and the sophistication which would belong to a European of his gifts and tastes.” Luis Cernuda and Gastón Baquero, poets from Spain and Cuba respectively, saw Darío as either unoriginal or unworthy of his Latin-American origins, which, Baquero claimed, Darío seemed to reject in one poem after another. Baquero, we should note, changed his mind later in life; he dedicated one of his last books, Memorial de un testigo (A Witness’s Memorial, 1966), to Darío. Is this proof of the kind of love/hate relationship that a solid number of Latin American poets have with the Nicaraguan? Indeed, since the twenties it has become a sport among young aesthetes to attack Darío in manifestos that proclaim a rupture, a rejection of his legacy, only to prove themselves hijos de Rubén, followers of the poet, in the years that follow.

The fact that youngsters throw stones at Darío proves that he has been, even for his opponents, a beloved enemy, an unmistakable and omnipresent landmark. We find this attitude in Pablo Antonio Cuadra and José Coronel Urtecho in Nicaragua itself, as well as in Spain and elsewhere in Latin America, as it was held by Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca, and a host of other, less gifted, poets. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, another Modernista, once said, apropos of one of the Nicaraguan’s favorite animal motifs, the swan, that it was the duty of every follower of Darío to “torcerle el cuello al cisne,” to wring the bird’s neck. Yet the work his accusers ended up producing has been remarkably Dariano. In any case, Cernuda and Baquero are part of the cadre of followers who have used the terms “decadent” and “melancholic” to attack the Nicaraguan poet. For them, the school of Rubenistas is about using symbols and meters that are foreign to the western shores of the Atlantic.

But what, in a culture such as ours, in which cross-fertilization is a sine qua non and the concept of purity in art is as elusive as it is artificial, can “foreignness” really mean? Latin-American literature in general, and poetry above all (not the poetry produced by pre-Columbian poets, of course, Nahuas such as Nezahualcoyotl and Axayacatl, but surely that which is the by-product of the colonial period and most crucially that which has been composed from Darío’s generation onward), is really the result of a constant bombardment of outside influences. Foreign models first from Europe (Spain, France, Italy) and then from the United States, represented in figures such as Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, have exercised enormous power. Darío was neither bashful nor deceitful about these models. And his temperamental attraction to melancholy no doubt makes him a “typical” fin-de-siècle artist. As for his Decadence, it was an imitation of French Symbolism and Parnassianism, as well as of the remnants of the Romantic Movement that had swept Germany, Italy, and England, and that had not a few late repercussions in the United States. For a Nicaraguan to dream of a poetry firmly established in the motto l’art pour l’art might be seen, in and of itself, as an anachronism. But cannot poets of these lands also share in the feast of Western Civilization? Why should a Central American Decadent be less worthy than, say, his North American counterpart, or for that matter, Gautier himself?

Of Darío’s Rezeptionsgeshichte, there are a number of essays worth reading for their clear and informed judgment. These include an illustrious exegetical essay by the Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, author of the significant mediation Ariel, in which the Anglo and Hispanic sensibilities are for the first time contrasted in sharp philosophical terms. Rodó championed the Modernista aesthetic through lucid literary explorations.