The next three chapters will examine modern Latin American texts, moving from modernismo, through the avant-garde and Neobaroque, to Post-Symbolism in poetry. We will explore the topic of Symbolism as a marker for the impasse of modernity announced by the Baroque, beginning with the constellation between Góngora and Rubén Darío. In this chapter we will study the continuities of Góngora's poetry in Darío's famous swan poems, examining the political significance of rape imagery in the modernista appropriation of Symbolist figures. This point of constellation between Darío and Góngora, significantly, anticipates the Gongorine tricentenary.

The 1927 revival of Luis de Góngora 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 González Echevarría has pointed out, Góngora's “rediscovery” actually began across the Atlantic in the work of modernista poets José Martí and Rubén Darío and the essayist Alfonso Reyes (Celestina's Brood 195). Rubén Darío'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 Góngora in advance of the tricentenary, most notably in his famous “Trébol” sonnets (272–74).

I do not, however, propose to focus on this specific case of Darío's selfconscious poetic celebration of Góngora; rather, I will attempt to demonstrate how a more general understanding of ideological and aesthetic continuities in Darío's work can provide valuable opportunities for the contextualization of Góngora's poetry within the evolution of the modern.

Several parallels emerge in comparing the circumstances and concerns of Góngora and Darío. 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.