IN 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.”  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 poetic representations of the city in ruins to conceptualize and criticize modernity. In a space that is always redefining itself, always in reconstruction, ruins can easily be treated as merely waste. However, these poets see in ruins the emblems of the city’s historical process, and in their poems they intend to rescue the remains of the past from the bulldozers of the future. Baudelaire’s work, with its powerful review of the failures of urban progress, expresses the melancholy of Parisians who feel that their city is becoming unrecognizable; yet it also manifests a fascination with the bizarre new versions of modern beauty. In turn, both Cernuda and Paz explore Baudelaire’s contradictory definitions of the modern city in their poetry, but without Baudelaire’s nostalgia. Their disillusioned, pessimistic vision of the modern city is charged with social and political indignation.

There are very few studies that examine in depth the connections among Baudelaire, Cernuda, and Paz, and I do not want to confine this essay to the apparent influence of Baudelaire on these Hispanic poets. Rather, I will analyze in the work of these three poets the ways in which modern poetry prioritizes the role of literary and historical memory and employs representations of the changing city and its ruins to reflect upon a crisis of perception. Although in Cernuda’s and Paz’s poetry many cities, both abstract and concrete, abound, Baudelaire’s Paris, the epitome of the nineteenth-century modern city, constantly casts its shadow upon the evolution of urban poetry.

Baudelaire’s Pieces of Paris

Why was Paris, in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the height of its reconstruction by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, paradoxically represented as a city in ruins? Although there are many possible answers to this question, we may start by noting that Haussmann’s project to modernize the urban landscape was extremely unpopular within the working class and the bourgeoisie. Because this disapproval was accompanied by a longing for the lost Paris of revolutionary times, the ruined city came to symbolize the transformation of a Paris associated with liberty and fraternity into a well-organized structure of great stores, great avenues, trees, and lakes—all in the name of efficiency and social control.

A passage from Théophile Gautier’s preface to Edouard Fournier’s Paris Démoli is likely representative of the overwhelming sense of loss and dislocation felt by many Parisians at mid-century: “C’est un spectacle curieux . . . ces maisons ouvertes avec . . . leurs escaliers qui ne conduisent plus à rien . . . leurs éboulements bizarres et leurs ruines violentes” (It is a curious spectacle . . . those open houses with . . . their staircases that go nowhere . . . their bizarre collapsed buildings and their violent ruins; my translation).  As a result, “le penseur sent naître en son âme une mélancolie, en voyant disparaître ces édifices, ces hôtels, ces maisons où les générations précédentes ont vécu. Un morceau du passé tombe avec chacune de ces pierres” (the thinker senses that a melancholic feeling is born in his soul when he sees the disappearance of those buildings, those palaces, those houses where previous generations have lived. A piece of the past falls with each one of those stones). Although Baudelaire shares Gautier’s melancholic feeling towards the changing Paris, unlike Fournier, whose project attempts to trace all the historical remains of the city, Baudelaire wants to capture the evanescent “present” and its many new urban faces.