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Broken Presents: The Modern City in Ruins in Baudelaire, Cernuda, and Paz

Broken Presents: The Modern City in Ruins in Baudelaire, Cernuda, and Paz N CONTRAST TO THE ENDURING ANCIENT RUINS of baroque and romantic poetry, the ruins of modern urban poetry tend to be short-lived—the remains of the destruction and reconstruction of a city’s streets, houses, public buildings, and factories rather than broken monuments and statues, abandoned churches, fragments of temples, or other remnants of a distant past. In these poems nature ceases to be the principal force that slowly “overcomes” the works of “civilization”: progress and war take over the role of ivy and time; spleen and ennui replace awe and nostalgia. As Georg Simmel has argued, in the modern— and often traumatic—experience of the metropolis, “The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains . . . its latest transformation” (409). In the city, people survive traffic, crowds, and advertisements, not tigers and serpents. Modern poems on ruins also differ from their baroque and romantic counterparts both in their reading of history and in their representation of the poetic self. The speakers in these poems are not fixed or stable; they can be both melancholic and nostalgic, humorous and ironic. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), and Octavio Paz (1914 -1998) all use http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Broken Presents: The Modern City in Ruins in Baudelaire, Cernuda, and Paz

ENJUTO-RANGEL, CECILIA
Comparative Literature , Volume 59 (2) – Jan 1, 2007
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2007 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-59-2-140
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

N CONTRAST TO THE ENDURING ANCIENT RUINS of baroque and romantic poetry, the ruins of modern urban poetry tend to be short-lived—the remains of the destruction and reconstruction of a city’s streets, houses, public buildings, and factories rather than broken monuments and statues, abandoned churches, fragments of temples, or other remnants of a distant past. In these poems nature ceases to be the principal force that slowly “overcomes” the works of “civilization”: progress and war take over the role of ivy and time; spleen and ennui replace awe and nostalgia. As Georg Simmel has argued, in the modern— and often traumatic—experience of the metropolis, “The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains . . . its latest transformation” (409). In the city, people survive traffic, crowds, and advertisements, not tigers and serpents. Modern poems on ruins also differ from their baroque and romantic counterparts both in their reading of history and in their representation of the poetic self. The speakers in these poems are not fixed or stable; they can be both melancholic and nostalgic, humorous and ironic. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), and Octavio Paz (1914 -1998) all use

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Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2007

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