Rubén Darío and the origin of poetic modernity in Latin America

Abstract

In his book Celebration of Modernism Saul Yurkievich states that the Vanguard, in its eagerness to impose a vertiginous present, propelled into the future, erased all legacy with the immediate past. The avant-garde categorically denied all the schools before them, "without glimpsing, as in many revolutions, that all their purposes and achievement had germinated shortly before." In a nutshell, the Argentine critic confirms what Octavio Paz in Los Hijos de Limo called the tradition of the rupture, that sway of fractures, interruptions, changes and rebellions that follow one generation to another. According to Paz, our tradition is made of interruptions and every break with it is a return to the past, that is, a return to tradition: the tradition of breaking.