Darío was born in Metapa. His childhood was filled with difficult economic situations, but his writing abilities allowed him to publish at a very young age. Darío displayed much talent from an early age, even appearing before the President of El Salvador at age 14. He then worked en the National Library of Nicaragua. He later traveled to El Salvador and then Chile.
It was in Chile where Darío consolidated the literary styles found in Europe.
His fundamental collection, Azul ("Blue"), was published in 1888 and established his reputation as one of the most important Spanish-language exponents of Modernism. Many critics consider his death in 1916 to mark the symbolic end of Modernism.
Darío marks an important shift in the relationship between literary Europe and Hispanic America. Before him, Latin American literary trends had largely followed European trends; however, Darío was clearly in the international vangard of the modernist movement.
His poetry brought back vigor to the stale, monotonous poetry of the time.
"My pick is working deep in the soil of this unknown America, turning out gold and opals and precious stones, an altar, a broken statue. And the Muse divines the meaning of the hieroglyphics. The strange life of a vanished people emerges from the mist of time." —Rubén Darío
In 1914 Dario was honored in New York with a silver medal from the Hispanic Society of America.
Dario is a modernist artist who describes his poetry as "the Hispanic form of the universal crisis in literature and spirit that began around 1885" ("RubenDario y el Modernismo").
Dario is considered the father of the Latin American modernist movement because of his innovative rhythmic and metric structure and his sensual imagery and symbolism ("RubenDario 1867-1916").
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