Continuities of Góngora in Darío's Swan Poems: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism, and Modernity

Abstract

The 1927 revival of Luis de Gongora is an important conjuncture in the modern appropriation of the poet’s work, but our appreciation of the event should not obscure the fact that the Gongorine resurgence on the peninsula had in fact deeper roots in the poetry of Latin America. As Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has pointed out, Gongora’s “rediscovery” actually began across the Atlantic in the work of modernista poets Jose Marti and Ruben Dario and the essayist Alfonso Reyes (195). Ruben Dario’s participation in French Symbolist circles, together with his exercises in imitation of Golden Age models, well equipped him to contribute to the revival of Gongora in advance of the tricentenary, most notably in his famous “Trebol” sonnets (27274).1 I do not, however, propose to focus on this specific case of Dario’s self-conscious poetic celebration of Gongora; rather, I will attempt to demonstrate how a more general understanding of ideological and aesthetic continuities in Dario’s work can provide valuable opportunities for the contextualization of Gongora’s poetry within the evolution of the modern. Several parallels emerge in comparing the circumstances and concerns of Gongora and Dario. These include a parallel historical positioning at moments in the rise of the city, leading to an aesthetic parallel in the cultivation of the pastoral mode, a similar problematic of subjectivity in the context of parallel avant-garde cultures, a secularization and eroticization of religious discourse, a similar display of proliferation of cultural artifacts, of pastiche, virtuosity and the cultivation of language and the writing process.2 My treatment of these parallels will converge in a discussion on the use of rape imagery by the two poets, in which I will draw upon