[citation needed] Precocious and prolific, from the age of 14 he signed the name Rubén Darío to his poems and stories of love, heroism, and adventure, which, although imitative in form, showed a strikingly vivid imagination.

He settled for a time in Chile, where in 1888 he published his first major work, Azul (“Blue”), a collection of short stories, descriptive sketches, and verse.

Darío had only recently become acquainted with French Parnassian poetry, and Azul represents his attempt to apply to Spanish the tenets of that stylistic movement.

In the prose works in Azul he discarded the traditional long and grammatically complex Spanish sentence structure, replacing it with simple and direct language.

Both the prose and poetry in this volume are generally concerned with objective description, and both deal with exotic subjects, chiefly classical mythology, France, and Asia.