The modernism of South America was inspired firstly by the Parnassian school of France, which did not until later give place to the new voice, symbolist or decadent. Verlaine, Samain, and Laforgue were then the chief models; but beneath the current of imitation a movement was forming which was more and more original, a great school of verse, the leading note of which was refinement. "We owe to foreign literatures, and more particularly to the French," says a writer already cited, "the refinement of the organs necessary to the interpretation of beauty; we owe to them our methods of observation and our love of impressions, rather than any kind of co-ordinated æsthetic perspective.... Our eyes have learned from them to see better, and our minds to gather fugitive sensations."
No writer represents this evolution, this progressive refinement, better than Ruben Dario, a poet of Central America (of Nicaragua), the recognised master of the new school and one of the greatest lyric writers of all time in the Spanish language. He is to America what Verlaine and Hugo are to France. His images, his phrases even, excite a servile imitation. A noble band of disciples aspires to continue his immortal work. He denies his disciples: "He who shall slavishly follow my track will lose his treasure, and, whether page or slave, will not be able to hide his livery." But in vain: ardent youth listens and lays its votive offerings at the feet of the great and disdainful artist.
His poetic reform was effectual in the extreme. He renewed the youth of archaic metres, adapted French rhythms to Spanish verse, and modified, with perfect taste, the classic division of the line of verse—the place of the cæsura. With equal mastery he has employed slow and majestic measures to interpret the melancholy of the flesh, or the dancing metres of Banville, or plastic forms of a Hellenic perfection. He seems to make his own the cry of Carducci: Odio l'usata poesia.
Modern Spanish poetry used often to employ verses of eight and eleven syllables, forms to which a certain rhetorical pomp very readily allies itself. An interpreter of new ideas, Dario would not, like the French poet, accept old forms; he employed lines of ten and twelve syllables, adopted the pentameter and hexameter of the classics, and employed verses of fourteen and sixteen syllables.[[17]] He displaced accents, and wrote admirable vers libres. A revolutionary, in ten years he had transformed Spanish poetry.
Prosas Profanas, published in 1900, is, according to the phrase of his incomparable critic, José Enrique Rodo, "the full tension of his poet's bow." From the paradoxical title to the wealth of metre, all is strange in this delicate piece of work, which opens a new literary cycle, as did Emaux et Camées or Fleurs du mal in France. The originality of the book comes from the poet's prodigious faculty of recognising in each school what is essential to him, and in appropriating it, without, therefore, ceasing to be personal. A lyric unrest carries him to one manner or another, but, archaic or modern, it becomes his own. His grace, suppleness, and learned complexity are unequalled; he will write a Symphony in Gris Majeur like Gautier, or poems in the manner of Verlaine, or a Chant an Centaure in the manner of Maurice de Guerin. His work is not built of imposing granite, but of many coloured marbles, with strange and decadent shades, such as the chiseller of the Camées loved.
RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and thinker.
His verse possesses at once the sensuality of a faun, the distinction of a marquis of the Grand Siècle, and the disenchantment of a mystic. No form, no period can arrest his wandering spirit:—
"Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo,
Boton de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa."[[18]]