SOURCE: "Rubén Darío: The Man and the Poet," in The Bookman, Vol. XLIX, No. 5, July, 1919, pp. 563-68.

In the following excerpt, Goldberg offers his estimation of Darío's role in Spanish literature.

Although it is but two years since his death, Rubén Darío is beginning to be looked upon not only as the greatest poet that Spanish America has produced, but as perhaps the greatest poet that has ever written in the Spanish tongue. Superlatives such as this always carry with them a trail of suspicion and mistrust; yet it is significant that they should be uttered at all, and doubly so when the utterance proceeds from a critic jealous of his standing, careful of his words and carrying conviction not only with the weight of his assertion but with the accumulation of his past services to letters. To Vargas Vila, the noted Colombian...