Villaurrutia and Baudelaire

to the complete works of Villaurrutia1 has pointed out (p. xxii) the importance of Proust, Cocteau, Supervielle, Giraudoux, the surrealists, the intellectual example of Gide, for the Mexican poet. Behind them all, however, stands the figure of Baudelaire, whose work forms the beginning of modern French poetic theory and attitudes. The present paper is an attempt to indicate some relationships between the author of the Fleurs du mal and the Mexican contempordneo, not so much in the way of direct imitation but more in the way of comparisons which seem significant. These relationships center about those themes of death, night, and dream, usually present in a discussion of Villaurrutia's poetry. The theme of death is an important one for both Baudelaire and Villaurrutia. The Fleurs du mal has a section of six poems entitled "La Mort." In the first of these poems, "La Mort des amants,"2 we find a note of a certain exaltation, the angel who "entre 'ouvrant les portes,/Viendra ranimer, fiddle et joyeux,/Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes." Thus life is associated, in Baudelaire, with memory, remembrance of things past. There is also an essential association with death and its necessary opposite, or complement, life. This parallel is basic in Villaurrutia. In the poem, "Canto a la primavera," it is the poet who poses this question which is the beginning of all poetic activity, the origin of love and its end, or a repetition of the love-death motif which can be found in the Baudelaire poem. Inherent in the Baudelaire piece is the idea of regeneration or rebirth: there is in the figure of the Angel the possible announcer of the final judgment, which is to be the beginning of another life. In Villaurrutia there is a similar innate impulse towards regeneration, but with the modification that it counts less in a moral or intellectual decision on the poet's part and is more natural in origin, somewhat comparable to Bergson's elan vital. With this association of the quest for an answer the poem follows a series of possibilities. First, from the earth characterized as sumisa, dormida, fatigada, he'rida, and which includes the past (olvidado) and death, emerges the dream of rebirth, of renascence: