Darío in Persepolis

Abstract

This essay proposes brief statements on the urbanite and the flâneur in real and dreaming environments, while analyzing some passages of Rubén Darío’s Parisian chronicles which constituted Peregrinaciones, as well as their intertextuality with Baudealaire’s Les fleurs du mal in the context of Paris along the second half of the 19th century. The aesthetic ideal is confronted to the impact that his bumping into a reality full of social injustice and moral decadence causes in the poet and chronicler, largely provoked by a patriarchal culture that equates city and woman, with the purpose of reifying, submitting and possessing her.