Super Humans - Rubén Darío

   Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (January 18, 1867 – February 6, 1916), known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo (modernism) that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Darío has had a great and lasting influence on 20th-century Spanish literature and journalism. He has been praised as the "Prince of Castilian Letters" and undisputed father of the modernismo literary movement. Darío spent his childhood in the city of León. He was brought up by his mother's aunt and uncle, Félix and Bernarda, whom Darío considered, in his infancy, to be his real parents. (He reportedly, during his first years in school, signed his assignments as Félix Rubén Ramírez.) He rarely spoke with his mother, who lived in Honduras, or with his father, who he referred to as "Uncle Manuel". Although little is known about his first years, it is documented that after the death of Félix Ramírez, in 1871, the family went through rough economic times and they considered sending young Rubén as a tailor's apprentice. According to his biographer Edelmiro Torres, he attended several schools in León before going on, during 1879 and 1880, to be educated by the Jesuits. A precocious reader (according to his own testimony, he learned to read when he was three years old), he soon began to write his first verses: a sonnet written by him in 1879 is conserved, and he published for the first time in a newspaper when he was thirteen years old. The elegy, Una lágrima, which was published in the daily El Termómetro (Rivas) on July 26, 1880. A little later he also collaborated in El Ensayo, a literary magazine in León, garnering attention as a "child poet". In these initial verses, according to Teodosio Fernández, his predominating influences were Spanish poets contemporary to José Zorrilla, Ramón de Campoamor, Gaspar Núñez de Arce and Ventura de la Vega. His writings of this time display a liberalism hostile to the excessive influence of the Roman Catholic Church, as documented in his essay, El jesuita, which was written in 1881. Regarding his political attitude, his most noteworthy influence was the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo, whom he deliberately imitated in his first journalistic articles. Around December 1881 he moved to the capital, Managua, at the request of some liberal politicians that had conceived the idea that, given his gift for poetry, he should be educated in Europe at the expense of the public treasury. However, the anti-clerical tone of his verses did not convince the president of congress, the conservative Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Alfaro, and it was resolved that he would study in the Nicaraguan city of Granada, but Rubén opted to stay in Managua, where he continued his journalistic endeavour collaborating with the newspapers El Ferrocarril and El Porvenir de Nicaragua.