Studies in SpanishAmerican literature Author:Isaac Goldberg Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III JOSE ENRIQUE RODO (1872-1917) In many respects the life and labors of Jose Enrique Rodo, the noted Uruguayan philosopher and litterateur, pr... more »esent a marked contrast to those of Ruben Dario. The Nicaraguan poet was himself a human lyre upon which the passing winds and events played their own subtle songs; he responded in remarkable degree to the varying influences of his time, presenting, in that response, an organic, mental and spiritual growth. Rodo, no less responsive, was of a more Olympian nature; indeed, if we are to use a phraseology that Nietzsche made popular, Dario is the Dionysian spirit, Rodo the Apollonian. Yet they are both men of their age; both represent, in varying degree and in most diverse manifestation, the self-expansion that characterizes the times. Despite his static life (which was altered only toward the end by a voyage to Europe during which he died, at Palermo), and his classical serenity, Rodo was one of the most dynamic spirits of his day. More than any other he realized the fluidity of modern thought, the resurgent self that lay at the bottom of the modernist movement and the general overturn in the world of ideas. In his famous study of Dario's Prosas Prof anas he proclaimed, as we saw,his own modernism, not in the sense of the word that connotes a prurient curiosity for the new, but in that larger significance which aligns a man with the spirit of the advancing age. Rodo's entire philosophy of unending self- renewal is, indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the search for self which, in latter days, has often assumed such ludicrous forms. He is the philosopher not only of modernism, but of eternal youth in the realm of thought. His work reveals how complex is that inner self which once seemed so simple to fathom; complex ...« less