This is a provocative new reading of a crucial and often misunderstood period of Spanish American literature. Most studies of modernismo have focused on the poetry of Ruben Dario and have noted the movement's aestheticism and its unmistakable French influences. Kirkpatrick concentrates instead on important negations of harmony and the movement's internal dismantling of its own precepts. Major contradictions within the movement itself are revealed through the works of the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig. Extending her analysis to later writers such as Ramon Lopez Velarde, Cesar Vallejo, and Alfonsina Storni, Kirkpatrick shows the changes that foreshadow the more overt experiments of these poets and illuminates the continuity between the modernistas and later generations.