Answer:
Although it is but two years since his death, Rubén Darío is beginning to be looked upon not only as the greatest poet that Spanish America has produced, but as perhaps the greatest poet that has ever written in the Spanish tongue. Superlatives such as this always carry with them a trail of suspicion and mistrust; yet it is significant that they should be uttered at all, and doubly so when the utterance proceeds from a critic jealous of his standing, careful of his words and carrying conviction not only with the weight of his assertion but with the accumulation of his past services to letters. To Vargas Vila, the noted Colombian critic, Darío is even more: "One of the first in the world, if the world possesses another like him".
Step-by-step explanation:
Assignment of rank, however, if it be one of the functions of criticism, is hardly the most important. What matters it if Darío be the greatest poet that ever wrote in Spanish, or merely the second or third, when we have the concrete and undebatable evidence of the immense influence he exerted upon the Spanish world of his time? To us of [the United States] Darío is important in more than one sense: not only is he the poet who summarizes an epoch and speaks for a continent; he is the man of the world who epitomizes a racial culture that we must surely understand better than we do now if we are to cement those ties with our Spanish-American neighbors which commercial relations only initiate but never fully tighten. Were it only from purely material motives we should know the cultural background of our prospective customers better, for it has become a platitude that in order to do business with our Southern neighbors we must be able to meet them socially and intellectually as well. But the [First World War] has emphasized another fact, one more fundamental to our present purpose: intellectual intercourse between different peoples leads to beneficial fertilization of one nation by another.