Cities in ruins in modern poetry (Charles Baudelaire, France, Luis Cernuda, Spain, T. S. Eliot, United States, Octavio Paz, Mexico, Pablo Neruda, Chile)

The portrayal of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of an aesthetic and political critique to the new versions of progress, the process of modernization, the brutality of war, or the erasure of the historical traces of the past. This dissertation analyzes how Baudelaire, Cernuda, Eliot, Paz and Neruda, in their own ways, uncover ruins as the effects of the real to reread and rewrite their historical and literary traditions. The modern poetry on ruins can project an apocalyptic vision of history, a poetics of disillusionment and of "cultural mourning," but it also produces a "historical awakening" that empowers it with political and historical agency. In contrast with Romantic poems, which carry a melancholic representation of the remains of the past, modern poems historicize ruins, often products of modern progress or war, and avoid a narcissistic, melancholic reading of destruction.; Baudelaire's Les tableaux parisiens and Cernuda's Un rio, un amor and Los placeres prohibidos show a strong preoccupation with the "memoire du present," the historical and aesthetic definitions of the modern city, paradoxically represented in ruins. While Eliot's and Paz's poems on ruins explore the topos through the recuperation and parody of the Baroque and the Metaphysical poets, Quevedo and Donne, to redefine their tensions with tradition through bodies in ruins, and destroyed cities, in The Waste Land and Homenaje y profanaciones.; My final chapter traces the political impact of the Spanish Civil War, and the aesthetic footprint of the Baroque ruins in Cernuda's, Paz's and Neruda's poetry. The ruined Madrid in Espana en el corazon transforms Neruda's eyesight and insight, an "awakening"---more a process than an abrupt change, which culminates in Alturas de Macchu Picchu . Neruda's poem to the Inca ruins enacts a search for the literary and historical origins of Latin America. Through the modern topos of ruins, unexplored territory until now, these texts aim to become a medium for the production of "historical memory," a means to read ruins as the effects of the real and translate the voices of the past.