Logo: Darío's princess

Question SA-3. Here is the text reference (p. 152/3, 4 & 153/1):

The chief figure of Modernism was the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (a name he adopted, perhaps to suggest a link to the exotic and distant empire of Darius). Darío crammed a lot of living (and considerable excesses) into his half-century (1867-1916), working as a journalist, diplomat and writer, often in places far removed from his homeland.

Darío is also responsible for giving Modernism its chief symbol: the swan, selected because of its great beauty and grace, and also because its main asset was its beauty (without any significant function). There was also mythological symbolism involved, since the Greek god Zeus had taken the form of a swan when he seduced Leda. Helen of Troy was the fruit of that union, and she became immortal, a symbol of the imperishable nature of true beauty inherited from her father-God. Darío's poem that follows ("The Swan") brings together these various elements of Modernism.

Darío knew the United States through travel and the careful reading of its literature. He admired the energy of the country, and we can see that admiration in the verses he wrote to honor Walt Whitman. But after the Spanish American War and Teddy Roosevelt's intervention in Panama in 1903, Darío began to be concerned over the danger which US dynamism and expansionism represented for the weaker and less organized nations to the south.