O corpo cadavérico em “O Noivado do Sepulchro”, de Soares de Passos, e “Uma Carniça” de Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

Romanticism is considered the first literary movement of modernity, once it promotes a break with the formal and thematic patterns bequeathed by the classical Greco-Latin tradition. However, among the different romantic generations, the second was the most disruptive, because it took the melancholic tendency of this movement to the paroxysm of the eroticization of death. Since Soares de Passos and Charles Baudelaire are the main exponents of this romantic branch in Portugal and France, this article examines their respective poems “O Noivado do Sepulcro” and “Uma Carniça” comparatively, with a view to examine how the corpse is represented in both texts. Through literary comparatism, we observed that, in Soares de Passos, necrophilia is nuanced by the aestheticization of death as a condition for eternity, in such a way that beauty takes precedence over the grotesque. In Baudelaire, the emphasis is on the grotesque, since the decomposing corpse is crudely exposed to stress human finitude.