"On est le fils de quelq'un": Prosas profanas y la génesis de <i>Los crepúsculos del jardín</i>

Abstract

Los crepúsculos del jardín is considered Leopoldo Lugones‘s most modernista book of poetry. Yet I contend that Lugone‘s s verses are a contestatory, posmodemista appropriation of the Parnassian language championed by Darío in the verses of Prosas profanas. In this book, Darío mastered a refined, rarified poetic idiom, the dominion of which he considered alien to the poetic sensibilities that Lugones had shown in the alexandrines of Las montañas del oro, a book that Darío reviewed in a polite but tendentious manner. Seemingly intending to prove Darío wrong, Lugones mimics the erotic topoi and cultured utterances championed by Darío in Los crepúsculos del jardín, but infuses its verses with prosaic and mundane, that is, secular and properly modern references. The mixture of the idea/ lyricism and its disenchanted counterpart is one of the trademarks of the posmodemista verse and its immanent, earth-bound definitions of both the poetic act and the poetic self.