Rubén Darío

Nicaraguan poet

• Born: January 18, 1867
• Birthplace: Metapa, Nicaragua
• Died: February 5, 1916
• Place of death: León, Nicaragua

Darío was the most influential writer of the movement in Spanish American literature known as Modernismo and was also one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. His strikingly original poetry, which includes stylistic experiments in meter and imagery, reinvigorated literature in both the Americas and Europe. His poetic vision, in which he sought to craft an aesthetic world as wondrous as the world itself, changed the direction of poetry in Spanish.

Early Life

Rubén Darío (rew-BEHN dah-REE-oh) was the well-known pseudonym of the Nicaraguan writer Félix Rubén García Sarmiento. When Rubén was three, his young mother, Rosa Sarmiento—who was separated from her middle-aged husband—permanently turned him over to her great uncle and aunt, Félix Ramírez and Bernarda Sarmiento in León. Some biographers speculate that Darío’s future restlessness, lifelong traveling, and stormy relationships may be explained in part by this early experience of abandonment.

A child prodigy, Rubén quickly learned to read and write poetry. By the time he was fifteen, he had worked as a journalist for several employers and was studying Greek and Latin classics under the tutelage of Jesuit priests in León. In January of 1882, he recited one of his poems before Nicaraguan president Joaquín Zavala and also received a short-lived appointment from the president of El Salvador to teach at a secondary school in that country. Later, he had a job in the Nicaraguan national library that enabled him to read widely and compose poems. He completed the promising but amateurish Epístolas y poemas: Primeras notas (epistles and poems: first notes) in 1884.

According to Darío’s 1915 autobiography and other accounts, he was already drinking heavily at the age of nineteen. Drinking and womanizing became habits that he would never renounce. After separating for a second time from love interest Rosario Murillo, he left Nicaragua for Chile and took a job there as a customs officer, a post he split with his duties as editor for La Época. His poem Canto épico a las glorias de Chile (epic song to the glories of Chile) won first prize in a Chilean competition, and his Rimas , named after the famous work by poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer of Spain, received an honorable mention.

Life’s Work

Although the sway of the Iberian Romantics such as Bécquer was clear in Darío’s early work, French Parnassianism, with its anti-Romantic insistence on objective description, and the related movement, Symbolism, with its experiments in poetic musicality, would prove key influences on Darío’s developing writing style. His 1888 publication of Azul (blue) inaugurated a new direction for poetry in Spanish, infusing it with a directness that discarded the ornate and less precise style of much Romantic poetry.

Darío’s experimental and genre-breaking collection of intermixed prose and poetry was revised and republished two more times, culminating in the 1905 edition, which Darío considered definitive. The second and third versions included a prologue by the established Spanish novelist Juan Valera, who championed Darío’s work widely, ensuring Darío considerable fame as a powerful new voice in both Spanish American and European letters.

For four years, Rubén traveled tirelessly throughout Central America, editing and writing for several newspapers, including La Prensa Libre in Costa Rica. In 1890, he married Rafaela Contreras. His first son, Rubén Darío Contreras, was born the following year. Although he was to have more children with his Spanish companion, Francisca Sanchez, his first son was the only child who would outlive him.

In 1892, when Darío was developing notoriety in Spain, he met several leading Spanish writers and critics in Madrid, where he had been called to serve as Nicaraguan representative for festivities commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. In addition to Valera, he became acquainted with Menendez y Pelayo and established a lasting friendship with the poet Salvador Rueda. His stay was cut short when his wife died in January of the following year, prompting his return to Nicaragua.

Although Darío claims to have been forced to do so, he married Rosario Murillo in May of 1893 at the insistence of her brother. He then fled from her for the remainder of his life, beginning with trips to New York and Paris two months after the marriage. During that same year, he served as a consul for Colombia in the cosmopolitan Argentine city of Buenos Aires, where he enjoyed a remarkable following as the leader of the modernist movement. His position as consul was disbanded in 1895, forcing him to live solely from journalism until he accepted an appointment as secretary to the postal director one year later.

In 1896, he published his second major work, Prosas profanas, y otros poemas (Prosas Profanas, and Other Poems , 1922). This verse collection exhibited the sort of experimentation that Darío had begun in Azul. However, in a fashion that was similar to the poetry written by French Parnassians who had become Symbolists, the verses in Prosas profanas are less objectively descriptive. Rather, they experiment with rhythm, meter, and sound in an attempt to evoke the spiritual through the physical, wherein highly charged eroticism is conjured in concert with an aestheticized spiritual vision.

Although Darío’s art was in many respects removed from the everyday and the political, he promoted a new hispanidad, which was a feeling of solidarity among all Spanish-speaking peoples in reaction to the growing Anglo-American dominance of the Western Hemisphere. In response to the Spanish-American War in 1898, he wrote “A Roosevelt” (to [Theodore] Roosevelt), an indictment against the United States. However, as one who keenly sensed the plight of humanity as universally tragic, he also encouraged all human potential to take flight, and he could still admire the laudable aspects of the vaunting new nation: an 1890 sonnet to Walt Whitman heralds him as the great prophet and leader of a rising nation, and the 1906 poem “Salutación al águila” (salutation to the eagle) praises the democratic and enterprising spirit of the United States.

While continuing to work for Buenos Aires newspapers, including La Nación, Darío set off to Spain in 1899 and then began a series of travels throughout Europe, stopping often in Madrid, Majorca, and Paris. He worked in Paris as a Nicaraguan consul until 1907. While he was there, he fostered a collaboration and friendship with Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who encouraged him to refine his drafts of old and new work in preparation for his 1905 masterpiece, which compiles over a dozen years of compositions: Cantos de vida y esperanza: Los cisnes, y otros poemas (songs of life and hope: “The Swans,” and other poems).

After a brief trip to Nicaragua in 1907 in a failed attempt to secure a divorce from his wife, Darío returned to Europe. Although he had been appointed a Nicaraguan consul to Spain, he never got paid. Desperate for funds, he hastily published El canto errante (the wandering song). Over the next few years, he traveled through Europe and wrote for newspapers and magazines but was constantly on the brink of poverty. By 1914, he was living on the Spanish island of Majorca, where he began to embrace Roman Catholicism passionately while still struggling with his own drinking and womanizing. One of his last works, Canto a la Argentina, oda a Mitre, y otros poemas (“Song to Argentina,” “Ode to Mitre,” and other poems), swings back and forth between religious salvation and erotic dissipation and perdition. These poems are true to his sense that art must embrace as much of life as possible, even if death, which he feared intensely, is inevitable.

Darío’s death did approach quickly. Diagnosed with incurable cirrhosis of the liver, he returned home to Nicaragua where, too weak to refuse, he was delivered to his lifelong pursuer, Rosario Murillo, who took care of him until he died on February 6, 1916.

Significance

Although Darío’s modernism became passé in the eyes of many following the dawn of the surrealists and the avante-garde in Spain and France, and even though his somewhat apolitical stance seemed inappropriate for artists living after the world wars, his poetry is among the best in the language, and later writers from both sides of the Atlantic, including Frederico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz, acknowledged his work as foundational, affirming that he changed literature forever.

Bibliography

Acereda, Alberto, and Rigoberto Guevara. Modernism, Rubén Darío, and the Poetics of Despair. New York: University Press of America, 2004. This indexed work is a penetrating study of Darío’s work as a specific expression of despair in context with his life and the modernist movement.

Darío, Rubén. Songs of Life and Hope: Cantos de Vida y Esperanza—A Bilingual Edition, translated and edited by Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. This collection of Darío’s poems includes a concise and useful English introduction to Darío’s life and works, a brief glossary, and English translations of the poems.

Derusha, Will, and Alberto Acereda, eds. Selected Poems of Rubén Darío: A Bilingual Anthology. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Includes a useful English introduction and a broad selection of more than sixty of Darío’s poems.

Jrade, Cathy Login. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. An accessible critical study of Darío’s works and the movement he inaugurated in the context of his time.

Watland, Charles D. Poet-Errant: A Biography of Rubén Darío. New York: Philosophical Library, 1965. This biography makes extensive use of Dario’s autobiography to narrate a tragic tale of a poet whose experiences and poetry, whose beauty were worthwhile in themselves, never quite served to overcome Darío’s initial abandonment by his mother.