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Darío had already begun to experience
the “dark side” in his own personal life.
Marital problems had tormented him in
his earlier days, and it was only after he
formed a happy relationship with Fran-
cisca Sánchez in Spain that domestic stress
diminished. But Darío's artistic tempera-
ment increasingly drove him to excesses
as he veered between an elegant and aris-
tocratic lifestyle and his inability to man-
age his finances and his drinking problem.
As the gathering clouds of World War I
cast their pall over Europe, he made his
way back to his birthplace where he suc-
cumbed to physical and emotional exhaus-
tion in 1916.
In a comparatively short life Darío pro-
duced a substantial volume of poetry, along
with prose fiction and effective journalism.
His work was published in a series of col-
lections, the most important being
Azul
(Blue, 1888),
Prosas profanas
(Profane prose,
1896), and
Cantos de vida y esperanza
(Song
of life and hope, 1905). More than 30 years
after Darío's death, Francisca Sánchez
donated to Spain a large collection of his
papers, including unpublished work, which
constitute the Rubén Darío Archive, an
invaluable source of knowledge about the
author's ideas and aesthetics.
There is almost universal agreement
among 20th-century Spanish critics that
Darío is a towering figure in their literature.
One of them declared that he was among
the greatest masters of Castilian rhythms
and the one who has most enriched the
language among all its recent poets. Darío,
who introduced the forms and meters of
the French Symbolist school at the end of
the 19th century, has been compared to
G
ARCILASO
DE
LA
V
EGA
of the 16th, who
introduced the forms and meters of the Ital-
ian Renaissance to Spanish poetry. Virtually
all Spanish poets who accepted the
moderni-
sta
identity acknowledge him as their guide
and inspiration. While some members of
the G
ENERATION
OF
'98 and their successors
drifted away from Darío, many others
remained committed to his approach to
poetry throughout their careers. Moreover,
despite his advocacy of “reform,” Darío was
aware of the deeper roots of Spanish cul-
ture and respectful of the very forms and
traditions that he was reworking in his
poetry. The strength and beauty of his writ-
ings comes not only from the “newness” of
his style but from his consciousness of what
had gone before. In sum Darío is the undis-
puted creator of the new wave in Spanish
poetry that swept across the Americas after
the publication of
Azul
and broke upon the
shores of Spain, changing the whole course
and character of Spanish-language poetry
from the late 19th century onward. Those
who clung to the sentimentalist school that
had hitherto predominated used
modernista
as an epithet to dismiss the enthusiastic
imitators of Darío who rose up in Spanish
America. But they were unable to repulse
the power of
modernismo
when it attained
its ascendancy as the 20th century dawned
in Spain. Reflecting a panoply of new per-
ceptions variously celebrated by French
poets as Symbolism, Parnassianism, or even
decadentism, Spanish
modernismo
remains,
nearly a century after Darío's death, a force
powerful enough to change the character of
Spanish-language poetry forever.
Dias, Bartolomeu
(1450-1500)
Portuguese navigator
This seaman, who played a historic role in
the long Portuguese search for a water
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