“Strong, manly, and full of human nature”: The Roots of Rubén Darío’s “Walt Whitman”

The second edition of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s Azul ... introduces an unexpected character: an elderly Walt Whitman, in a sonnet named in his honor. As I seek to demonstrate, Whitman’s surprise appearance in the foundational work of Latin American modernismo culminates a complex sequence of textual transfers occurring over several months in 1890: In late May, two reporters visit Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, and narrate their experience in an interview that was republished in several newspapers; in June, a Nicaraguan journalist incorporates an unacknowledged translation of the interview in an article for the Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York ; and Darío cites the Spanish-language article as part of the inspiration for his sonnet, published that October. What links these depictions is less an admiration for Whitman’s verse than a fascination with his body, imagined and re-imagined across languages, genres, and media. The texts dwell on the poet’s weakened physique, only to insist upon the virility of a face that comes to express intersecting anxieties of sexual nonconformity and socioeconomic reordering in continental America.