SOURCE: "Master of Hispanic Modernism," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3459, June 13, 1968, p. 620.

In the following excerpt, the critic assesses Darío's career and literary influence, concluding that he "remains one of the most talked of and least understood of Latin American poets. "

At the height of his career, the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, bestrode the Atlantic like a colossus. Although born in a remote corner of Central America, this most provincial of provincials was to become the focus of literary life in Central America, in Chile, in Buenos Aires and finally in Madrid; and the outstanding representative of the Modernist movement which ended the provincialism of nineteenth-century Hispanic literature and brought it into the mainstream of western culture.

Darío's success as a poet is inseparable from his personal history. From the moment when—still in his early teens—he was taken from León...