ESCENARIS DE BARCELONA: PRETEXTOS DE POESIA

Starting from the proposition that modern poetry may well be unimaginable without the city, Francesc Parcerisas provides a critical overview, via Baudelaire, of the representation of Barcelona from Verdaguer’s “A Barcelona” to Gabriel Ferrater’s “La ciutat.” Although the city is not yet the exclusive scenario of literary imagination for Verdaguer, Oller, Rusiñol, and even Maragall, it becomes so for Joan Salvat-Papasseit —the first poet to write, as it were, from rhe belly of Barcelona itself— and for Josep Maria de Sagarra, who takes the city as a spectacle lived from within. Josep Carner, Mercè Rodoreda, Marià Manent, Joaquim Renard, and Pere Quart, no less than a number of foreign writers from the Civil War, all contribute to reflections on the city as the paradigmatic site of the “shared” plays of anonymity, individualism, and desire, of growth, revolution, and utopia, that mark modernity.