Revisiting Dario today as a cultural condensation point between centuries

Abstract

Much has been written about the founding father of the Modernist American movement, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Less perhaps, and that is what this article seeks to develop, has been written about the intellectual Darío of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, his role and context, as well as the conditions, circumstances and contradictions that surrounded his figure. Our interest is to place him as an intellectual who constituted a social, cultural and political condensation point of that turn-of-the-century transition period. More than just a Nicaraguan poet, Darío was adopted as a preeminent figure by various countries, from Guatemala to Chile and Argentina, and he was well aware of it. Along with a new way of conceiving literary writing, Darío established a style of acting, a way of relating literature with the institutionality of power, with diplomacy and with intellectual centers. That is the Darío that interests us here, the one who functions as a mirror to trace the figure of the Latin American intellectual and his new conditions and characteristics, as a new condensation point of the intellectuals in the passage from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.