SOURCE: "Rubén Darío: Latin American Modernism and Literary Tradition," in Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9, 1983, pp. 36-42.

In the following essay, Pearsall contradicts the traditional view of Latin American modernism as an "isolated phenomenon" by revealing the movement's historical and contemporary literary significance as expressed in Darío's poetry.

The works of Latin American Modernism written at the beginning of the twentieth century are an ideal source for studying the problem of literary tradition in twentieth-century literature, for they represent a crisis in our cultural history, a transition between two periods: Romanticism and the twentieth century. The "traditionalist" view of Hispanic Modernism has been that it has very little to do with our own present-day literature. Modernismo has therefore tended to be seen as an isolated phenomenon, relatively separate from both earlier and later trends.

The work of the important revisionist critics of the contemporary period...