ABSTRACT
A dilettante and the leading figure in the esthetic movement known as Modernismo in Latin America, which roughly covered the years 1885 to 1915, Ruben Dario was an astonishingly influential poet and man of letters in the Spanish-American language and might be the most important poet in Hispanic culture since Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. He brought French Parnassianism and Symbolism into the Americas. His books include Azul... (Blue, 1888), Prosas profanas (Profane Prose, 1896), and Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope, 1905). Darío produced several poems on Israel and the Jews. For instance, in Canto a la Argentina (1914), he included the following lines; " Sing out, oh Jews of the Pampa! strapping young men of rustic grace, sweet Rebeccas of candid glance and Rubens with tumbling curls, patriarchs with heads of hair white and thick as a horse's mane, sing, sing out ancient Saras and adolescent Benjamins, lift the heart's own voice in song: 'We have arrived in Zion!'
