#eltit

Franco, Jean. An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print.

 Brief overview and short readings of many of the major figures in Latin America. Great definitions and analysis of modernism. 

Here, Darío puts into a sentence the three essential strands that bound together a disparate group of individual writers- 1.the rejection of any overt message or teaching in art; 2. The stress on beauty as the highest goal; 3. The need to free verse from traditional forms. (119)

…Darío was the central personality of the whole movement, not only for his own experiments and innovations but also because his extensive travels through the American continent helped to link poets of different countries and give them a sense of solidarity. Not only this, he helped to found or contributed to many of the little magazines that sprang up all over  the continent as part of the campaign on behalf of the new poetry. (119-120)

Hitherto, most writers had regarded literature as a weapon in a social or political struggle. But the modernist believed that contemporary society was in the wrong, since all over the continent governments deified material progress…In contrast to societies which pursued the chimera of material progress, the Modernists sought values that were atemporal and eternal, and they found these values in art. (121)

One of the first tasks of the Modernist was to restore and rehabilitate imagination (123)

The crisis [of universal crisis of literature according to Darío] had arisen as a result of nineteenth-century intellectual progress. Scientific discovery had undermined the edifice of traditional belief yet it had failed to give any sense of purpose to the individual and to society; it had been unable to provide any other goal than material prosperity…Far from offering a solution in this crisis, the reigning philosophy of positivism discouraged speculation and, in any case, had become vulgarized. (123)

Revolution of forms Spain still tied to tradition, France offered new models with Parnassians, Symbolists etc.

Modernists-and Darío in particular- learned from them all. From the Parnassians came the cult of perfection and the exotic symbols of princesses and swans, centaurs and Pierrot and Columbine; from Verlaine they learned the importance of musicality; from the Symbolists and from Mallarmé for whom ‘tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’, they learned to sublimate the conflicts and variety of the real world into verbal syntheses of symbols. Yet we should beware of thinking in terms of plagiarism or mechanical imitation. (125)

The Modernists were not cosmopolitans because they preferred the foreign to the native, but simply because they regarded all art as cosmopolitan. Art might be the province of a special élite, but it was an élite which knew no frontiers. ‘Exoticism’ is simply another aspect of this… The Modernist attempted to give his poetry an atemporal and universal validity and hence he tended to avoid the particular, the contemporary and the local. (126)

Harmony, then, is one of the keynotes to Prosas profanes, a harmony of sound which expresses the harmony of soul which Darío achieved through his poetic  creation if not in existence. (143)

Darío – mythology, sensuality (143-145), yeats copulating in the foam musicality