Safo, la musa y Andrómaca: desdoblamientos ambulatorios de Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

This paper explores the motif of walking in Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil (1857), making some connections with the Spleen of Paris (1869), through three "character-themes" or "mythemes" from the Greco-Latin tradition: Sappho, the muse and Andromache. It is proposed that, in the unfolding of the poet in these three figures, baudelairiana poetics offers a triad of walks that allow him to capture his experience in a Paris that was suffering changes in its architecture, social life, and cultural industry. These unfoldings are: erotic walking (Sappho), mendicant walking (the muse) and allegorical walking (Andromache). Using Walter Benjamin's ideas about the hero as a central element of Baudelaire's myth-poetic thought, it is intended to encompass these expressions as a way of confronting a nineteenth-century urban geography. We wonder about the relationship of poetry with myth and its ability to give meaning to an experience overwhelmed by the changes that modernity generates in the lives of its inhabitants. From a thematological approach, it seeks to establish bridges within the baudelairiana work that allow to understand its production as a coherent and articulated whole.