Page:Darío - Eleven Poems.djvu/12

 the traditions of our language and literature. He was a reader of both the classics and the moderns, and essayed such widely different tones as those corresponding to the solemnity of the blank verse and to the fluency of the romance. Soon after, he took up the study of the modern French and, partly, the English literatures; and his poetry, in Azul, began to show the marvellous variety of shading and the preciosity, of workmanship which were to be his distinctive traits in Prosas profanas. His most important achievement was the book of Cantos de vida y esperanza. There he attained (especially in the autobiographical Pórtico) a depth of human feeling and a sonorous splendor of utterance which placed him among the modern poets of first rank in any language. His later work did not always rise to that magnificence, but it often took a bold, rough-hewn sort of Rodinesque form, which has found many admirers.

As a prosodist, Ruben Darío is unique in Spanish. He is the poet who has mastered the greatest variety of verse forms. The Spanish poets of the last four centuries, whether in Europe or in America, although they tried several measures, succeeded only in a few. Like the Italians before Carducci, they had command only over the hendecasyllabic, octosyllabic and heptasyllabic forms. A few meters, besides these three, have at times enjoyed popularity, as, for instance, the [vi