Path of perfection

In 1910, Manuel Díaz Rodríguez published Camino de perfection. In this book he exposes with clarity and impeccable style the aesthetic credo of the modernist movement: the perfect fit between the idea and the word.
Path of perfection focuses on two fundamental aesthetic issues for the time:

• the exhaustive examination of the literary exercise wielded by intellectual movements confronted with newer literary preferences,
• and a formulation of the precepts that should guide literature and art.

Modernism arrived late in Venezuela and appeared after the last vestiges of romanticism. There this new movement was linked with the Symbolists, and the Parnassians. And it is quite possible, as some analysts of Spanish-American literary history have said, that modernism in Venezuela was the product of the crisis generated by the excesses of romanticism.
The generation to which Díaz Rodríguez belonged, emerged in the late nineteenth century, lived doomed to rebel against the old models and this left a deep mark on Camino de perfection.