Rubendario

Ruben Dario

Since Ruben Dario was a little kid, he was always interested in all the things related with literature. He grew up reading North American poets like Poe and Whitman being influenced a lot by them. But Ruben Dario not only read poetry, he turned into poems with a purpose. What Ruben Dario wanted to do through his style in poetry was to put away the old view, which was just based upon the repetition of the same themes; personal conflicts, and love. He sugested the value of images, the colors, and the rhythm of the sounds. In contrast, Ruben Dario tried to write about themes less personals, he always tried to keep his eyes and his thoughts more toward the things around him than himself, because looking at himself and writing about himself would be like going to that old style from where he was pushed to create this movenment.

Ruben Dario wrote a poem to president Roosevelt, in which he expressed the feeling that this person raised in his mind. Theodore Roosevelt was an individual who most represented the U.S incursions in Latin America that outraged even nonpolitical poets such as Ruben Dario. Latin Americans had admired the energy, wealth and democracy of the United States, but now they feared the bullying of their northern neighbor. President Roosevelt supported the revolution in Panama (1903) that resulted in the annexation with the U.S . Besides this, what really motivated this author was the relationship between them. He expressed his political worries among U.S and Latin America. Ruben Dario shows in this poem a continous rhythm since the first stanza to the last, he keeps a point of respect to this powerful country but criticizes the way its imperialistic politic works. He stated that how is posible that the U.S fights for the Freedom, while in other territories it is taking the liberties from people by imposing its own laws. Ruben Dario used free verses that let him go through a better way of meaning, also as a symbol of liberty. The structure of the poem represents the idea of a natural liberty that is the central theme of the literal work.

It is with he voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman,
That I should come to you, Hunter,
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with somethin gof Washington and more of Nimrod

You are the United States,
You are the future invader
of the Native America that has indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are skillful; you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alexamder Nebuchadnezzar.
( You are a professor of energy
as today's madmen say)

You think that life is fire
That progress is eruption,
that where you shoot
you hit the future.

No

The United States is potent and great.
When you shake there is a deep tremblor
that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, it is heard like the roaring of a lion.
Hugo already said to Grant: The stars are yours.
(The Argentine sun, ascending, barely shines,
and the Chilean start rises...) You are rich.
You join the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon,
and illuminating the road of easy conquest,
Liberty raises its torch in New York.

But our America, that has had poets
since the ancient times of Netzahualcoyolt,
that has walked in the footprints of great Bachus
who learnedPan's alphabet at once;
that consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis
whose resounding name comes to us fro Platon,
that since the remote times of its life
has lived on light, on fir, on perfume, on love,
America of the great Montezuma of the Inca,
the fragant America of the great Christopher Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America in which noble Cuahtemoc said:
"I'm not in a bed of roses"; that America
that trembles in hurricanes and lives on love,
it lives, you men of saxon eyes and barbarous soul.
And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates, and it is the daughter of the Sun.
Be careful. Viva Spanish America!
There are a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion.
Roosevelt, one would have to be, through God himself,
the fearful Rifleman and strong Hunter,
to manage to grab us in your iron claws.

And, althoug you count on everything, you lack one thing:God!

A Roosevelt

In short, Ruben Dario could be considered as the most important ambassador of the modernist Literature. In his work concerning literature, this great writer reacted with a new idea, for him it was meaninfless to write a complex composition. Ruben Dario believed that the essences of the literature is how simple and realistic we can make it look, rejecting the old idea of writing poetry in that complex style where sometimes the author never was able to understant either, but just because it sound complicated was allowed. Due to Ruben Dario new ideas came to be developed within the society, and these ideas also developed a sense of a free expression, without thinking that something against them could be raised.

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