La lírica impersonal de la urbe moderna : aproximación a Baudelaire como traductor de Edgar A. Poe

Abstract

Poe’s work had little impact in nineteenth century America, his own country being blindly devoted to industrial development and material progress. The metropolis, the core of modern civilization, condemns man to a condition of irrelevance and anonymity that is particularly devastating for artists and intellectuals; but both Poe and Baudelaire found in the city and its formless masses an artistic object, and conceived a method that eluded the obsolete codes of realist representation and efficiently revealed the modern lyricism of urban landscapes. Baudelaire’s flaneur is clearly inspired in his admired Poe’s "man of the crowds", and it reflects a modern sensitivity to the role of the artist.