The modern poet and the beggar: two literary attitudes

Abstract

The objective of this article is to read “A Une Mendiante Rousse” by Baudelaire to compare it with Victor Hugo’s poem “Le Mendiant”. The purpose is to contrast these two distinct poetics that use as their theme the fi gure of the urban man exiled by society and to analyze a discordant image created by Baudelaire that shocks the reader and subverts the treatment of the poor in the poems produced in the fi rst half of the 19th-century. Keywords: Poetry. Modern poetry. Charles Baudelaire. Victor Hugo.