Ruben Dario

Félix Rubén García Sarmiento was born on January 18, 1867, in Metapa, a small Nicaraguan town that was later renamed Ciudad Darío after its most famous son ^[1]. His parents, Manuel García and Rosa Sarmiento, separated shortly after his birth, and the infant was taken to León, the old colonial city in western Nicaragua, where he was raised by his great aunt Bernarda Sarmiento and her husband, Colonel Félix Ramírez ^[2]. The surname Darío, which the boy eventually adopted, was a family nickname that his paternal ancestors had carried for generations.

The child read early and voraciously. By his own later account he was devouring Don Quixote, the Bible, and volumes of Spanish classics found in an old chest before he turned ten. León's Jesuit teachers gave him a grounding in Latin and rhetoric, and local newspapers began printing his verses while he was still a schoolboy. He was reciting poetry at public functions and composing elegies for hire so young that Nicaraguans called him el niño poeta, the boy poet ^[2].

At thirteen he published verse in the León daily El Termómetro, and his reputation spread quickly to Managua. National politicians considered sending the prodigy to Europe on a government scholarship, but the plan collapsed, reportedly because his liberal, anticlerical juvenile writings alarmed the conservative president of the Congress ^[3]. Instead the teenager worked in the national library in Managua, an accident of politics that deepened his reading in Spanish literature from the medieval period onward.

Any account of who was Ruben Dario has to begin with his departure from Nicaragua. In 1886, at nineteen, he sailed for Chile, then one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan countries in South America. In Valparaíso and Santiago he worked as a journalist for papers including La Época, absorbed French literature, and moved on the edges of a literary elite far wealthier than he was ^[3]. The Parnassian and Symbolist poets of France, Théophile Gautier and Paul Verlaine above all, showed him possibilities of form and music that Spanish verse of the period rarely attempted.

The result was Azul, published in Valparaíso in 1888, a slim book of short stories and poems whose polished prose and unfamiliar rhythms announced something new ^[1]. The book might have passed unnoticed had the eminent Spanish critic and novelist Juan Valera not devoted two open letters to it in the Madrid press. Valera praised the young Nicaraguan's talent while marveling at his thorough absorption of French aesthetics, and the endorsement made Darío's name on both sides of the Atlantic ^[4].

Azul became the founding document of modernismo, the movement Darío came to lead. Modernismo prized musicality, exotic imagery, swans and princesses and classical mythology, and above all the idea that a poem's beauty was its own justification. For the first time, a literary current born in Spanish America flowed back toward Spain and changed the poetry written there, a reversal of three centuries of one-way influence ^[4].

Darío's second landmark collection, Prosas profanas y otros poemas, appeared in Buenos Aires in 1896 and represents modernismo at its most ornate ^[1]. The book's dexterity with meter was startling: Darío revived old Spanish forms, imported French ones, and handled the alexandrine with a flexibility that younger poets rushed to imitate. In the same year he published Los raros, a set of essays on writers he admired, including Poe and Verlaine, which served as a kind of critical manifesto for the movement ^[5].

His masterpiece came in 1905 with Cantos de vida y esperanza, published in Madrid. The decorative surfaces of the earlier books gave way to graver themes: time, death, faith and doubt, and the political destiny of Spanish America ^[1]. The collection contains the ode 'A Roosevelt', addressed to the American president after United States intervention in Panama, in which Darío warned the colossus of the north that Spanish America was alive and had claws. It also contains 'Lo fatal', a short meditation on mortality that remains among the most anthologized poems in the language ^[5].

Among the most cited Ruben Dario achievements is his renovation of Spanish prosody itself. Critics as demanding as the Spanish poet Pedro Salinas and the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz treated him as the writer who ended a long period of stagnation in Castilian verse, and Paz devoted a major essay, 'El caracol y la sirena', to his work ^[6]. Poets of the following generations, including Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and later Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, acknowledged his influence directly; Neruda and Lorca delivered a joint homage to him in Buenos Aires in 1933 ^[6].

Poetry never paid Darío's bills; newspapers did. From 1889 he was a correspondent for La Nación of Buenos Aires, one of the most important dailies in the Spanish-speaking world, and the association lasted most of his life ^[3]. His dispatches from Spain in 1898 and 1899, written in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, were collected in España contemporánea and offered Latin American readers a sharp portrait of a defeated empire taking stock of itself ^[5].

Diplomatic posts gave him titles, travel, and intermittent income. He served Colombia as consul in Buenos Aires in the 1890s, represented Nicaragua at the celebrations of the fourth centenary of Columbus in Spain in 1892, and was named Nicaragua's minister to Spain in 1907, presenting his credentials to King Alfonso XIII ^[2]. He also represented his country at the Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1906. The appointments were rarely stable, and salaries often arrived late or not at all, but they placed the poet at the center of the era's literary capitals: Buenos Aires, Madrid, and above all Paris, where he lived for long stretches after 1900 ^[3].

In Paris he directed the magazine Mundial Magazine from 1911, an illustrated monthly aimed at Spanish-speaking readers, while continuing to publish poetry and chronicles. Journalism shaped his prose style, quick, visual, and cosmopolitan, and much of what is known about his life comes from the autobiographical pieces he wrote for the press, gathered in 1912 as La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo ^[5].

Darío's private life was turbulent and often unhappy. In 1890 he married Rafaela Contreras in Guatemala; she died in 1893, leaving him a widower at twenty six with an infant son ^[2]. Within weeks of her death he was pressed, by his own account under coercion involving her family, into a marriage with Rosario Murillo in Managua. The union failed almost immediately, but Nicaraguan law and Rosario's refusals made divorce impossible, and the legal bond shadowed him for the rest of his life ^[3].

His lasting companion was Francisca Sánchez, a peasant woman from Ávila whom he met in Spain in 1899. Unable to marry her, he lived with her in Madrid and Paris for years, and she bore him several children, of whom only one son, Rubén Darío Sánchez, survived early childhood ^[2]. Francisca, who was illiterate when they met and whom Darío taught to read, preserved a large archive of his manuscripts and later donated it to the Spanish state, where it forms the core of the Rubén Darío archive at the Complutense University of Madrid ^[7].

Alcohol was the persistent wreckage in this story. Darío drank heavily from youth, suffered repeated physical and nervous crises, and wrote candidly about his terrors of death and the afterlife. Biographers connect the anguished religious questioning of his mature poetry to these private struggles, and his health was visibly broken well before his final decade ended ^[3].

The last phase of Darío's life mixed public honor with private decline. He published Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas in 1914, including a long ode commissioned by La Nación for the centenary of Argentine independence ^[5]. That same year the outbreak of the First World War cut off his income from European publications and drove him from Paris.

In late 1914 he sailed for New York, where he gave a reading at Columbia University and hoped to raise money through a lecture tour promoting peace. Instead he contracted pneumonia, and the tour dissolved ^[3]. Gravely ill, he traveled to Guatemala in 1915 and then home to Nicaragua, where Rosario Murillo, still legally his wife, took charge of the dying poet.

Rubén Darío died in León on February 6, 1916, of cirrhosis of the liver, a few weeks after his forty ninth birthday ^[1]. Nicaragua gave him a funeral of extraordinary scale that lasted several days, and he was buried in the Cathedral of León at the base of the statue of Saint Paul, where his tomb, guarded by a sculpted lion, remains a national shrine ^[7].

Few writers have marked a language as visibly as Darío marked Spanish. Historians of literature conventionally divide Spanish-language poetry into before and after modernismo, and modernismo is inseparable from his name ^[4]. The generation of Spanish poets who rebuilt the country's literature after 1898 read him closely, and the great Spanish American poets of the twentieth century, whatever their quarrels with his ornamental manner, built on the technical freedom he won ^[6].

His presence in Nicaragua approaches that of a founding figure. His birthplace was renamed Ciudad Darío, the national theater in Managua bears his name, his image has appeared on the córdoba currency, and his birthday is marked with national observances ^[7]. The house in León where he spent his childhood operates as the Rubén Darío Museum and Archive, preserving manuscripts, personal effects, and first editions ^[7].

For readers who want basic Ruben Dario facts, the essentials of any Ruben Dario biography are these: a self-taught prodigy from provincial Central America absorbed the most advanced European poetry of his day, fused it with the Spanish classical tradition, and produced a body of work that made Spanish verse modern. UNESCO's Memory of the World program and scholarly editions on both sides of the Atlantic continue to document his manuscripts and correspondence, and 'Lo fatal', 'Sonatina', and the 'Canción de otoño en primavera' are still memorized by schoolchildren across twenty countries ^[6].