Modernist Literary Movement and Rubén Darío

Modernism: A New Attitude Towards Life

Modernism represents a revivalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art, reflecting a new attitude towards life. It emerged as a response from intellectuals rebelling against the 19th-century crisis, moving away from realistic rationalism toward a subjective spiritual wave. Its primary source was Latin America.

Literary Sources and Influences

The literary sources and influences of Modernism include Romanticism, American poets, and French poetry. Key trends include:

• Parnassianism: Defined by "art for art's sake," where beauty is clean and spotless, based on external perfection.
• Symbolism: Focuses on undefined, vague, and hidden realities within an intimate world to discover impossible meanings.

Core Topics and Features

Escapism and Cosmopolitanism

• Escapism: Choosing dreams over reality.
  • Interior: The Ivory Tower. The poet focuses on their feelings to escape from life's problems.
  • Exterior: Distance in time and space. Elements of the modern world are blended with medieval mythology.
• Cosmopolitanism: An avoidance of the mundane with an aristocratic sense. Paris became the Nouveau capital.

Romantic Unease and Love

• The Romantic Unease: Characterized by passion, irrationality, mystery, fantasy, dreams, melancholy, and the atmosphere of autumn nights.
• Love: Focused on beauty, sensuality, physical pleasure, erotica, and the femme fatale.

Modernist Symbols and Language Revolution

Modernist Symbols

Swan, Peacock, Blue, Ivory Tower, Gemstones.

Revolution of Literary Language

• Vocabulary: Focus on sound, adjectives, neologisms, cultisms, exotic terms, and antepenultimate stress.
• Rhetorical Literary Devices: Alliteration, anaphora, parallelism, metaphor, musicality, synesthesia, and antithesis.

Renewal of Metrics

Modernism brought a renewal of metrics, including new stanzas, old 9-syllable verses, 11-syllable verses, and 12-syllable verses with caesuras.

Rubén Darío and His Major Works

Born in Nicaragua in 1867, Rubén Darío was a journalist who in 1892 traveled from Latin America to Spain, where he befriended several Spanish poets. He lived in Paris, experiencing Parnassianism and Symbolism firsthand. His travels across America and Europe helped spread Modernism.

Key Literary Works

• Blue (1888): A book written in verse and prose, already containing characteristic modernist elements: rhythm, musicality, exoticism, eroticism, and the exaltation of American roots over Spanish ones.
• Profane Prose (1896): Represents the consolidation of modernist aesthetics. This book of poems, written in verse, is filled with princesses, swans, and worlds far from reality.
• Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905): Represents a major change; although it continues to escape from reality, it retrieves Spanish literary and historical roots, which he exalts against U.S. imperialism. It reflects on personal, intimate, and human themes.