Page:Darío - Eleven Poems.djvu/13

 alexandrine during the romantic period; but they suffered from stiffness of accentuation. Darío, and the modernist groups which sprang into action mainly through his stimulus, gave vogue, and finally permanence, to a large number of metrical forms: either verses rarely used, like the enneasyllabic and the dodecasyllabic (of which there are three types), or verses, like the alexandrine, to which Darío gave greater musical virtue by freeing the accent and the cæsura. Even the hendecasyllable acquired new flexibility when Darío brought back two new forms of accentuation that had been used by Spanish poets during three centuries but had been forgotten since about 1800. He also attacked the problem of the classic hexameter, which has tempted many great modern poets, from Goethe to Swinburne and Carducci, and, before these, a few of the Spanish in the XVIIth century, chiefly Villegas. He introduced, finally, the modern vers_libre, the type in which the number of feet, but not the foot, changes (as in the Marcha triunfal), as well as the type in which both the number of syllables and the foot vary frequently.

In style, Rubén Darío represents another renewal. He not only fled from the hackneyed, from expressions which, like coins, were worn out by use: it is the natural outcome of every new artistic or literary tendency to do away with the useless remains of

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