Introduction

This volume combines Darío's two most important early books. Azul, published in Chile in 1888, is half exquisite prose tales and half poems: in 'The Bourgeois King' a poet at the court of a rich king is reduced to grinding a barrel organ and freezes to death in the snow; in 'The Blue Bird' a poor poet in Paris says a blue bird lives in his brain and in the end shoots himself to set it free. Blue is the colour of dream and ideal. Profane Prose, published in Buenos Aires in 1896 and despite its title a book of poems, is the summit of modernista poetry, full of swans, princesses, nymphs, Versailles and Greek myth, rich in music; in its 'Sonatina' a sad princess waits in a golden cage for a prince riding a winged horse. Together the two books brought the music of French poetry into Spanish and opened a new age.