In this chapter we trace the progress of Rodó's ideas from his first published work to the point just before Ariel propelled him to international recognition in the Spanish-speaking world. The thesis being pursued is that Rodó's task at this stage was to identify the values that he expected from art, and that while he acknowledged these values in some predecessors, he found them generally lacking in his contemporaries. As he conveyed this judgement, he was implicitly laying down the foundations for Ariel and later work. We will consider Rodó's development in four roughly chronological sections: first, some preliminary incursions, both private and public, in the areas of criticism and Americanist ideology that became his future career; second, a selection of his work in the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales; third, his positioning vis-à-vis modernism in the first two volumes of La vida nueva (The new life); finally, his teaching at the University of Uruguay.

Rodó used the half-decade leading up to Ariel to absorb and evaluate current aesthetic ideas and to consolidate an Americanist project the seeds of which were already present in his childhood musings. By “americanismo” Rodó meant Latin Americanism, as the United States was to become a distinct and increasingly oppositional entity for him and other Latin American intellectuals after the Spanish–American War of 1898, when Spain lost its last colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines) to the northern giant.

We can get an inkling of the role Rodó was beginning to conceive for himself from a document written roughly at the mid-point between his childhood and his going public, namely the draft of a letter, dated 24 April 1889, to the editor of a newspaper or journal in Santiago de Chile. In it a seventeen-year-old Rodó appears to be responding to an invitation to send regular material: “Puede V. contarme en el número de sus colaboradores, […] aun cuando no puedo comprometerme a mandarle originales en determinados plazos, trataré de hacerlo con la mayor asiduidad.” (You can count me as one of your collaborators, […] even though I cannot commit myself to a fixed timetable, I will try to send you original material as assiduously as possible.)