SOURCE: "Socio-Political Concerns in the Poetry of Rubén Darío," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 6, July-December, 1990, pp. 36-49.

In the following essay, Jrade identifies sociopolitical themes in Darío's poetry, focusing on the literary and political similarities between Spanish-American modernism and an emergent Spanish-American identity.

Critics who have set out to examine Rubén Darío's political poetry have tended to define politics in a narrow manner. They have confined themselves for the most part to those poems that deal explicitly with American themes. As a result of this focus, scholars as perceptive as Pedro Salinas, Arturo Torres-Ríoseco, and Enrique Anderson-Imbert, among others, have written about gaps in Darío's interest in politics—usually from the 1888 publication of Azul … [Blue …] to the 1905 publication of Cantos de vida y esperanza [Songs of Life and Hope]—and have tended to emphasize a few specific poems...