José Enrique Rodó

Who was José Enrique Rodó?

José Enrique Camilo Rodó Piñeyro was a Uruguayan essayist. He called for the youth of Latin America to reject materialism, to revert to Greco-Roman habits of free thought and self enrichment, and to develop and concentrate on their culture.

He cultivated an epistolary relationship with important Hispanic pensadores of that time, Leopoldo Alas in Spain, José de la Riva-Agüero in Peru, and, most importantly, with Rubén Darío, the most influential Latin American poet to date, the founder of modernismo. As a result of his refined prose style and the modernista ideology he pushed, Rodó is today considered the preeminent theorist of the modernista school of literature.

Rodó is best known for his essay Ariel, drawn from The Tempest, in which Ariel represents the positive, and Caliban represents the negative tendencies in human nature, and they debate the future course of history, in what Rodó intended to be a secular sermon to Latin American youth, championing the cause of the classical western tradition. What Rodó was afraid of was the debilitating effect of working individuals' limited existence doing the same work, over and over again, never having time to develop the spirit.