As we pointed out in the previous post, Rubén Darío laid the foundations of this movement to renew Spanish-language poetry (and literature in general), known as "Modernism". In this post I will summarize the characteristics of his poetry and of that movement, and with it his contributions.
Traits and contributions of Hispanic American Modernism
First of all, what is the origin of the spirit of the times that will be embodied in this movement? One such as the one that gave rise to similar movements in Europe at the end of the 19th century, which could be summarized as follows: dissatisfaction with the present, which is characterized, among other things, by the feeling of a spiritual void that has been produced not only by the impoverished life in the nascent cities and the predominance of the cold capitalist interest, but also by the marginalization of the spiritual and emotional life generated by the dominant rationalism (think about the reach that Positivism had had).
On a plane more linked to verbal culture, in the modernist attitude there will be a reaction against the decline in the use of language by the crowd, as well as against puritanism and castrating traditionalism in thought and art. We find, especially in the prefaces that Darío makes to his books, clear expressions of this. He declares his "abhorrence of mediocrity", "of aesthetic flattery". He accuses "the absolute lack of mental elevation of the thinking majority of our continent", but recognizes the value of the great tradition of the Spanish language in Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Santa Teresa, Góngora, Quevedo. He expresses his "respect for the aristocracy of thought, for the nobility of Art". He says with propriety:
The verbal cliché is harmful because it encloses the mental cliché, and together they perpetuate the ankylosis, the immobility.
This attitude led him to seek out and nourish himself with the most renewed form of poetry, which was not being written in Spain precisely, but in France, in two movements of the second half of the nineteenth century: Parnasianism and Symbolism (about which I have written here: see 1 and 2). It also recognizes in America the poetic contribution of the great Walt Whitman (3).
The scholar and poet Octavio Paz contributes with his evaluation in this way:
Nothing more natural than for Spanish-American poets to be attracted by the French poetry of the time and to discover in it not only the novelty of a language but also a sensitivity and an aesthetic impregnated by the analogical vision of the romantic and occult tradition.
In Parnasianism, he values the awareness of poetry as an art of words, that is, as a craft and a faculty of working hard with language, like the Greek sculptor who from raw stone gives birth to the beauty of the figure. This is also the reason for the preeminence given to the sensory image, especially the visual and auditory.
From Symbolism, the primordial function given to the symbolic power of the word, which is, then, suggestion and not designation. And in alliance with the first, in the auditory, the preponderance given to music, which is sonority and rhythm. We will return to this later.
So we can notice that with Modernism is born in Latin America (and radiates to Spain of that time) the conscience of poetry as cultured, autonomous and personal practice, free of the romantic spontaneous excess and of realistic determinisms.
Subjectivity is privileged as a fundamental value of poetic creation, and from there to the imagination, and its beloved daughter: the fantasy.
One aspect that is often emphasized when talking about Modernism is its cosmopolitanism, which some have seen as an incorrectness, being rather what allowed other literatures to be explored, the cultural vision to be expanded, even the value of the indigenous legacy to be recognized, as Paz points out.
There is no doubt that Modernism, through different influences, was the bearer of "a devotion to the refined form"; that cult that led it to appreciate beauty in the chromatic, brilliant and sonorous qualities of and by the word, in the exoticism conceived in verbal images, even in archaisms and neologisms.
This formal devotion led to an interest in recovering forgotten types of verse or the introduction of new metric forms. With regard to the former, we must highlight the reintroduction of the so-called "Alexandrian" verse (of 14 syllables, composed of two hemistichia), which allowed the resurrection of accent verse, in which what is important is no longer syllabic regularity, but the rhythmic.
The musicality, and in it the rhythm, is capital in the characteristics and contributions of the Hispano-American Modernism, particularly rubendarian. It is not simply the final rhyme of the verses, a feature present in the compositions of authors and works from previous centuries and movements. It is, first of all, the verbal music, that which is reached by the sonority within the verse or between verses by resources such as the reiteration of sounds and words (masterfully using alliteration, anaphora, polysyndeton, encabalgamiento, among other rhetorical figures). And, secondly, what Darío called the "ideal melody"; this is much more difficult to grasp. We read in one of his prefaces:
As every word has a soul, there is in every verse, besides the verbal harmony, an ideal melody. The music is only of the idea, many times.
This last one -the ideal music- is, in short, the most important one to assimilate the vision of rhythm that Rubén Darío develops and proposes, and that is associated to that old sensibility expressed in the analogy, or the correspondence, feeling of the world with occult roots (Pythagorism, alchemy, Swedenborg, Fourier, etc.) that comes to Darío from romanticism and symbolism. It is the recognition of the rhythm in things given by their correspondences. Paz captures it very well in these phrases:
Poetic rhythm is but the manifestation of universal rhythm: everything corresponds because everything is rhythm. Sight and hearing are linked; the eye sees what the ear hears (...) Fusion between the sensitive and the intelligible; the poet hears and sees what he thinks. And more: he thinks in sounds and visions.
(It will continue in the last post with examples of poems by Rubén Darío and comments)
Bibliographical references
Darío, Rubén (1977). Poetry. Venezuela. Ayacucho Library.
Paz, Octavio (1985). The sons of the slime / Vuelta. Colombia: Oveja Negra Publishing House.
Rama, Ángel (1970). Rubén Darío and Modernism. Venezuela: Ediciones Biblioteca Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Sucre, Guillermo (1985). The mask, the transparency (2nd ed.). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
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