Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics

Contents

Contents ix Acknowledgments 1 Chapter One Introduction 23 Chapter Two Urban Ruins in Baudelaire’s and Cernuda’s Poetry 23 The Modern City: From Ruins to Waste 26 Broken Presents: Walking among Ruins in the Modern City 44 The Other Room: The Shattered Dreams of Baudelaire and Cernuda 61 In the Middle of the Street: Revisiting Baudelaire’s and Cernuda’s Modern Urban Poetics 75 Cernuda’s “Ruins”: The Ultimate Historical Allegory? 89 Chapter Three Cities in Ruins: The Burlesque Baroque in T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz 89 In Search of Neo-Baroque Pearls 102 Eliot’s Donne: “Expert beyond experience” 116 Paz’s Quevedo: From Love to Ruins, a Parody of Conceits 125 The Neo-Baroque Chiaroscuro of Paz’s “Himno entre ruinas” 131 Among Stones: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Paz’s “Petrificada petrificante” 143 Chapter Four The Spanish Civil War: A Transatlantic Vision 143 “Hay que tener ojos en la nuca”: Toward a Transatlantic Historical Memory of the War 157 The Racial Other: The Transatlantic Poetics of Solidarity of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén 174 The Feminization of Spain and Its Ruins: Antonio and Manuel Machado, Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, and Miguel Hernández 205 Cernuda’s Clouds and Paz’s Voices: The Elegies to Spain vii 225 Chapter Five Pablo Neruda’s Cities in Ruins: Poetic Histories from Madrid to Machu Picchu 225 Historicizing Ruins 227 Against the Nostalgic Self 234 Caro’s “Itálica” and the Traces of the Past 237 Spain in Ruins: Neruda’s Political Commitment 254 Journey to the Center of the Past: Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu 269 Chapter Six The Effects of the Real: Reading Ruins in Modern Poetry 281 Notes 307 Bibliography 341 Index viii Contents ...