The modernism of South America was inspired firstly by the Parnassian school of France, which did not until later give place to the new voice, symbolist or decadent. Verlaine, Samain, and Laforgue were then the chief models; but beneath the current of imitation a movement was forming which was more and more original, a great school of verse, the leading note of which was refinement. "We owe to foreign literatures, and more particularly to the French," says a writer already cited, "the refinement of the organs necessary to the interpretation of beauty; we owe to them our methods of observation {263} and our love of impressions, rather than any kind of co-ordinated æsthetic perspective.... Our eyes have learned from them to see better, and our minds to gather fugitive sensations." No writer represents this evolution, this progressive refinement, better than Ruben Dario, a poet of Central America (of Nicaragua), the recognised master of the new school and one of the greatest lyric writers of all time in the Spanish language. He is to America what Verlaine and Hugo are to France. His images, his phrases even, excite a servile imitation. A noble band of disciples aspires to continue his immortal work. He denies his disciples: "He who shall slavishly follow my track will lose his treasure, and, whether page or slave, will not be able to hide his livery." But in vain: ardent youth listens and lays its votive offerings at the feet of the great and disdainful artist. His poetic reform was effectual in the extreme. He renewed the youth of archaic metres, adapted French rhythms to Spanish verse, and modified, with perfect taste, the classic division of the line of verse--the place of the cæsura. With equal mastery he has employed slow and majestic measures to interpret the melancholy of the flesh, or the dancing metres of Banville, or plastic forms of a Hellenic perfection. He seems to make his own the cry of Carducci: _Odio l'usata poesia_. Modern Spanish poetry used often to employ verses of eight and eleven syllables, forms to which a certain rhetorical pomp very readily allies itself. An interpreter of new ideas, Dario would not, like the French poet, accept old forms; he employed lines of ten and twelve syllables, adopted the pentameter and hexameter of the classics, and employed verses of fourteen and sixteen syllables.[17] He displaced accents, {264} and wrote admirable _vers libres_. A revolutionary, in ten years he had transformed Spanish poetry.