Rubén Darío

Rubén Darío, born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in a small Nicaraguan town in 1867, was raised by a great-aunt after his parents separated early. He could read at three, and in his teens was already famous across Central America as 'the child poet'. At nineteen he went to Chile, where, living in poverty, he read his way through the French Symbolists and Parnassians, and in 1888 published Azul, which shook the Spanish-speaking literary world. He then served as a diplomat for Nicaragua and other countries and as correspondent for the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, moving for years between Buenos Aires, Paris and Madrid. He founded and led the movement called modernismo, utterly renewing the metres and language of Spanish poetry, so that for the first time Latin American literature in turn influenced Spain itself. In his last years, worn down by drink, poverty and illness, he returned to Nicaragua and died in León at forty-nine.