Abstract
The essay deals with the attention which is increasingly drawn to existential aspects of Spanish - American literary modernism, a cultural movement from the last two decades of the 19th century until the first two decades of the 20th century, traditionally described as ornamental, beauty focused and innovative. Since the existential side of modernist poetry is now thought to have influenced a great deal of the 20th century poetry, it seems to be one of its strongest expressions.
The text takes into account especially the poetry by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and tries to explore possible links to later French existentialism in literature, also in relation to the Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno or the Spanish poet and Darío's friend Juan Ramón Jiménez. It shows that there may have been an early, so called "higher" form of existentialism begun by the Spanish-American modernists to support the importance of a human being, which later, as a reaction to the World Wars, transformed into a "lower" form of existentialism.