[In the following essay, Nunes describes the growth of modern poetry in Brazil, focusing on the works of such authors as Murilo de Arajújo, Raul Bopp, Cassiano Ricardo, and Mário de Andrade.]

A complete understanding of the phenomenon of Brazilian Modernism is possible only by examining it on three planes; universal, continental, and national. Brazilian Modernism is, in this first plane of universality, a result of the circumstance of Time, even as it lives as a national artistic movement with repercussions in all facets of life. Artists immediately interpreted the new perspective of the world, of life, representing the many social, philosophical, and scientific facts which were the essence of Western Modernism. “Cherchez la femme” recommends a character of Dumas the Younger to Sherlock deciphering a crime. By analogy, we suggest to those looking for an explanation to the complexity of modern art that the reason is removed from the territory of art and lies in areas that seem distant and alien to artists' dreams. There is a clear difference between our way of life in which the media of telephone, radio, television, movies, car and plane impose themselves, and the scent of the tranquil past unfolding to a slow rhythm. In the affirmation of this difference may be found, empirically, the reason why today's artist does not repeat Mozart, Goethe, Ingres, Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Anatole France. Rostand's poem (of course, Rostand, so typical of the mentality of the “belle époque”) in which he censures the noisy airplane for interrupting his rest in his country garden, encloses a symbolic value. But, the insipid protest of this antiquated and affected poet must have seemed grotesque to the English poets of the last World War. They not only suffered the airplanes' noise but the bombs they sprayed over a fearful and virtually unarmed London.

A new definition of the cosmos, Einstein's, challenged the modern world, as did Freud's new concept of the Nature of Man, his subconscious. To these conquests of an ever innovating science are added other factors which stimulate a change in attitude on a world-wide basis: Bergson's philosophy which underlines change and flux rather than the permanence upheld by traditional philosophers; William James's psychology which confronts the hegemony of Cartesian rationalism with the flow of the disconnected impressions of “stream of consciousness”; and a socio-economic theory, Veblen's, which appraised the ruling classes, not in the light of order, productivity and comfort, but in that of sterility, waste and frustration. Before all, therefore, Brazilian Modernism consists of a reaction to these universal factors, as did Italian Futurism, French Surrealism and Anglo-American Imagism to cite only three manifestations of the general phenomenon of Modernism in the West.

The Brazilian shares with North Americans and other Latin Americans a consciousness of his American condition which is a source of both pride and confusion. Every American of sensitive spirit must face the inescapable problem of adjusting a European cultural tradition to his own environment. This adjustment is more difficult than anticipated because it depends on an arduous preliminary task: the achievement of self-knowledge. What does it mean, really, to be an American? Europe has no interest in our search for our own way, in the same manner that parents offer little real help to their adolescent children in developing their own identity, wanting them to imitate their own image or to fulfill their dreams for them, often quite mad. Until recently, Europe either felt uncomfortable or displayed a sardonic attitude when confronting the Americas, demonstrating thereby her disapproval, her feeling of betrayed parenthood. Meanwhile, as often happens in life, having proved their own capabilities, the Americans can now count on the sympathy and admiration of the Old World. The search for identity is tied to another problem: the search for an individual expression. This is the fundamental struggle of Brazilian Modernism against academic Parnassianism, a Europeanizing trend. It is similar to the battle fought by writers in the United States against the Victorian literary tradition which suffocated their potentialities.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF BRAZILIAN MODERNISM

The problem to which we have just referred is not the creation of Modernism. It presented clear irrefutable evidence of a turbulence in our American spirit which had been provoking us during the slowly passing years. All of Brazilian literature constitutes an effort on the part of the writers of real worth to capture the truth of our interior essence, to mold this vision of the “interior landscape” to which Proust referred. Gonçalves Dias, Alencar, Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto are among those who before Modernism came closest to the creation of a genuinely national literature. Romanticism, contemporary with Brazilian independence and despite its European origins, rooted itself so deeply in our country, acclimated itself so perfectly, that it could pass for a native product. The excesses of youthful inexperience allowed Parnassianism, foreign and antagonistic to the Brazilian personality, to establish a literary dictatorship which was to last for almost half a century. The remarkable resistance of this “gallic” movement to the vicissitudes of time was due to the fact that it had assimilated not only the features of Romanticism which had preceded it, but also those of Symbolism which appeared at the close of the Nineteenth Century. To sum up, the literary current which governed Brazil with force and prestige in the twenties and which the Modernists had to face up to, was not the pure Parnassianism of Leconte, but an eclectic academicism, imitative, insignificant and watery. No matter how it tried to express Brazil, this academic current could only create a subordinate art totally submissive to Europe. A triumphant literary conformity relied on the support of the government and the ruling class which nourished itself exclusively on European sustenance. Today we accept Jorge Amado's novel, Villa-Lobos' music, Portinari's painting and Niemayer's architecture as indisputable, so it is difficult to imagine this situation. Academic Parnassianism thrived on the drooling admiration which the Old Republic and São Paulo's coffee aristocracy lavished on France and which was ample enough to encompass both the splendid prose of Renan and the very “spiritual” legs of Mistinguette. If it be true, as Gilberto Amado stated in a famous comment, that “each street in Paris is a river that flows from Greece,” then we must conclude that Parnassianism in Brazil held much more of the “belle époque” Paris than it ever did of the Greece of Pericles. And when Coelho Netto confronted the iconoclasticism of the Modernists in a now famous session of the Brazilian Academy of Letters with the scream: “I am the last Hellenist,” this prolific, occasionally admirable writer never realized that his unbearable prolixity, his affected vocabulary, and his superficial thinking quite cancelled his Greek citizenship.

Nevertheless, after the outbreak of the First World War, the high esteem for European civilization began its decline in the Americas. Indications of this were slowly emerging in the literary sector, from the satiety with foreign “imports” to a desire for innovation and the use of “native material.” This short period of commotion and doubt which comes to a climax in February 1922 with the sensational realization of Modern Art Week is referred to as “Pre-Modernism.” It is in 1917 that poets such as Manuel Bandeira and Mário de Andrade make their début, the latter with an inferior book of “exquisite inferiority.” Two years before, Cassiano Ricardo had already burst upon the literary scene with a book of poetry. Signs of rebellion also appear in the works of Ribeiro Couto and Raul de Leoni as well as others. This desire for experimentation was true even of the works of writers who had distinguished themselves as advocates of Classical poetry, such as Guilherme de Almeida, Menotti del Picchia and Ronald de Carvalho who never became Modernists. As Mário da Silva Brito documents so well in his critical História do Modernismo Brasileiro, it was Monteiro Lobato's uncalled-for attack on Anita Malfatti's painting that in 1917 drew together the few aware writers who were dissatisfied with the situation. In other fields of art, other malcontents joined the rebellious writers as in the case of Villa-Lobos, Brecheret the sculptor, and the painter Di Cavalcanti. The hard battle for the new art was fought in the columns of the press by Oswald de Andrade who was later to give a new dimension to satire in Brazil, and by Menotti who deployed his customary brilliance in this polemic. In 1921, in a series of articles entitled “Old Masters,” Mário de Andrade made a critical evaluation of the idols of Parnassianism, an undertaking without precedent until that moment. Previously, they had basked in warm eulogies. After these signs of unrest, the explosion of Modern Art Week was inevitable. The raucous derisiveness of an infuriated audience failed to diminish the significance of the event. Scandals, aggressions, and polemics raged from 1922 to 1930 in a period we may describe as bellicose. 1930 is a meaningful year for Brazil in politics and in literature. The Old Republic falls and the productive phase of Modernism begins. Young people such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Augusto Federico Schmidt who had rallied to Modernism in its early skirmishes, were followed after 1930 by the elements of a newer generation—there is always a newer generation arriving on the scene—among whom Vinicius de Morais stood out. He had a rather vehement beginning, rather wordy and metaphysical—always more wordy than metaphysical to be exact.

It is interesting to note that while the entire intellectual community felt aversion for the “New State” (President Getúlio Vargas' “Estado Nôvo”), it was precisely this regime which consolidated the position of Modern Art in Brazil. This was due principally to the well-met efforts of Cassiano Ricardo, the inspired, subtle man who suggested an ideology to President Vargas, and also to the influence of Gustavo Capanema, Minister of Education and former companion of Carlos Drummond de Andrade in their bohemian literary days. The battle against the dictatorship of the “New State” of Vargas drew together all of the idealistic writers and paradoxically turned “Getulismo” into a major creative impulse of literature in Brazil. Modernism is consolidated and reigns until 1945. At this point, another literary generation surges forth, deriving from Modernism, but already rejecting many aspects of the movement led by Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. But this is another story, as Maugham would say. The fundamental characteristics of Modernism are, in my opinion, the following ten:

1. The Rediscovery of Brazil.
2. The Valorization of Primitivism as a Force Which Shapes the Social and Racial Reality of the Country.
3. Spoken Language Instead of Written Language.
4. The Discovery of Poetry in the Prosaic.
5. Experience and Absorption in What Is Real Rather Than Imitation of Inconsistent Fancies.
6. Complete freedom of Investigation. The Acceptance of Subconscious Manifestations.
7. The Continuations of the Positive Traditions of a Valid Past.
8. A Transfigurative Visualization.
9. The Role of Humor.
10. The Theory of the Brazilian as a “Cordial Man” Linked to the Idea of Brazil as a Land of Paradise.

THE REDISCOVERY OF BRAZIL

Our history textbooks point to 1500 as the date of Brazil's discovery. Yet today, Brazil is still being discovered by every foreigner who steps on its soil. The most painful, the longest, the most anguished discovery is the one being realized by Brazilians themselves. Despite the efforts of the Romantics who were so often frustrated through their own immaturity, and those of the exceptional authors who were already mentioned, Brazil in 1922 was waiting to be truly discovered when it was commemorating the first centennial of its independence. Without question the Parnassian movement had provided a solution of continuity to this process of understanding our country initiated by the Romantics. The most formidable obstacles facing the Brazilian in getting to know his country were its enormous extension and the hardships of communication. Euclides da Cunha in Contrasts and Comparisons notes the psychic distance existing between the Brazilian and his country: “Most of all, it is painful that we still rely on the outdated pages of Saint Hilaire for information about Brazil. We estrange ourselves from this land. We have created the extravagance of a subjective exile which separates us from her, while we wander like sleepwalkers across her unfamiliar undulations.” Gilberto Amado, man of realistic temperament, called to his readers' attention the rootless Bovarism which motivated Brazilian intellectuals at the turn of the century. He underlined the caprice of the patrician poets of that era in speaking of fall and winter as if they lived in Europe and not in tropical Brazil. In research articles which I wrote for the literary supplements of Correio da Manha in 1924, I proved that even then the dominant spirit in the sacred cultural circles of Rio was that of spiritual exile and a complete commitment to French literature—and what is even sadder—second rate French literature. Bourget and Sully-Prudhomme were rated as immortal geniuses at the same time that Péguy, Claudel, Proust and Gide were grotesquely repudiated!

The discovery of Brazil had to be undertaken, first of all, geographically. Capistrano de Abreu had already suggested once to Paulo Prado that to know his country well he should sail in a ship that cruised the coast and with time and patience explore all of the small ports in Brazil. Mário de Andrade, I believe, deliberately never left Brazil, took the advice of the elderly Capistrano and went across the entire Amazon region to the Peruvian border. Oswald de Andrade traveled through Minas marveling at its colonial cities. In a little poem he celebrated Aleijadinho's “Prophets” which “monumentalize the landscape” in Congonhas do Campo. However, it was Gilberto Freyre, the sociologist, who was to create the type of poem characteristic of this phase, “Bahia de Todos Os Santos e de quase todos os Pecados.” This was later followed by a profusion of picturesque literature about Bahia. This literature was so abundant that Drummond de Andrade from Minas could not help an ironic comment in his poem about this excessive interest in Bahia:

É preciso fazer um poema sôbre a Bahia …
Mas eu nunca fui lá.
(I must write a poem about Bahia, …
But, I was never there.)

Gilberto Freyre was the impulse behind this Kodak literature which sought the bizzare and the lyrical. He might have said as did Antônio Nobre: “Where are the painters of my extraordinary country? Where are they, that they paint it not?” Freyre also inspired the major poem of this literary trend, Manuel Bandeira's “Evocation of Recife.” This poem in which we find such personal feelings, such intimate reminiscences was, quite curiously, written on request for the commemorative edition of a newspaper in Pernambuco.

As the decade of '30 approached, Modernism began to lose its “local color” aspect. Augusto Federico Schmidt advocated the revelation of a more spiritual and less physical Brazil, proclaiming: “I want no more of the picturesque: I want no more geography.” We cannot dismiss, nevertheless, the geographic tendency in Modernism. I believe that due to the efforts of these poets a good part of Brazil was definitively discovered!

THE VALORIZATION OF PRIMITIVISM

It seems to me that it was the discovery of a new type of man—the savage—rather than the discovery of new lands which shook the spirit of the Renaissance European. From this confrontation with “natural man” emerged a series of reflections or concepts. Perhaps the most famous and fruitful of these is Rousseau's “Noble Savage” theory.

The natural prestige of European culture in Brazil notwithstanding, the Brazilian intellectual could not help but observe that Brazil had a very different make-up from that of Europe. That distinction stemmed from the fact that of the three races that comprise Brazil, two were primitive. The Brazilian Romantic solved the problem quite easily by inventing the myth of a noble, heroic Indian ancestry. It was a defensive measure deployed by the Brazilian-born against society's preference for the Portuguese. At that time, many distinguished Brazilian families changed their Portuguese family names to native Tupi words: Tibiriça, Tanajura, Sucupira, Umbuzeiro, Umburana, Marapuama.

Nevertheless, the Negro, who weighed much more in the racial composition of Brazil had to wait a much longer time to be seriously appreciated. When he published the first edition of History of Brazilian Literature in 1888, the first such to be written with sociological and ethnographic criteria, Sílvio Romero was obliged to confess to knowing virtually nothing about the Negro in our country. In 1906, Nina Rodrigues sent her African studies to the printer. However, quite symptomatically, this work was not to reach the public until 1933. After this date, and because Modernism made fashionable our various groups of primitive population, the investigations into the Negro in Brazil became so intense that Fernando Goés, annoyed by this insistent focalization issued a humorous protest in the following terms: “In reprisal for that scientific examination of the Negro, I propose to do a series of sociological studies on the dress of the white man, the cuisine of the white man, the sexual life of the white man. …”

One of the most expressive examples of the exaltation of the primitive people in Brazilian Modernism may be found in a letter from Raul Bopp to Abguar Bastos: “What is genuinely ours is the Negro and the Indian because they were the ones with the greatest contact with the land, the Indian with the unforgettable education of jungle life, and the Negro with the transformation of wilderness into productive plantations. The white man was ashamed to work. Cruel race. Impostors. Preoccupied with family names. Even today one can still hear the old, “Do you know to whom you are talking?” with all the trappings of our false democracy. (…) Let us give more attention to the Indian. The fundamental people. Subjacent, but determining the structure of the edifice. A return to natural man without deceit and artifice. “Seele” as pure as Klagos wishes him to be. (A figure of some projection here in Germany.) And, we still have the Negro who has been but a shadow on our racial panorama. The Negro, rooted to the soil, who came from the plantations, who brought with him the “macumba” and nostalgia of Africa. Who shook our music and helped to create the “maxixe” (a dance). The white man brought grammar, the baccalaureate, the law of “good sense” imposed by the King and catechism. … He arranged formulas for our sensibility. He killed our sensibility.”

As you see, the over-evaluation of the primitive was accompanied by a contempt for the Portuguese element—a flagrant injustice. Gilberto Freyre, however, was to mark with legitimate enthusiasm the role of the Portuguese in the formation of Brazilian civilization. Of course, Oliveira Vianna had preceded him in this effort, but in an overtly racist manner.

In its task of calling attention to the roots of Brazil, Modernism initiates a new Indianism whose most outstanding examples include Cassiano Ricardo's “Martim Cererê,” Mário de Andrade's “Macunaíma” and Raul Bopp's “Cobra Norato.”

Negro poetry which surged triumphantly in the United States during the “Roaring Twenties,” imposed mainly by two inspired and emotional young men, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and also cultivated by Regnio Pedroso and Nicolás Guillén in Cuba, was to find its most talented executor in Jorge de Lima of Brazil. His Poemas Negros are the most important achievement in this genre. Murilo de Araújo who explored onomatopoeic effects in his poetry also deserves praise. In the United States Vachel Lindsay, well-known author of “The Congo,” had practiced the same recourse. Let us look at an example from Araújo's poem “A Macumba Zabumba”:

Que retumba em rumor
tão fundo, tão fundo, em ribombo de morte
nos grotões do pavor—
É a macumba, é a macumba!
E retumba o tambor. …

In “Toada do Negro no Banzo” which inspired the music of Heckel Tavares, Murilo de Araújo attempts to recreate Negro rhythms:

Negro,
quando cava, quando cansa
quando pula, quando tomba
quando grita, quando dança
quando brinca, quando zomba
sente gana de chorá
Negro,
quando nasce, quando cresce
quando luta, quando corre
quando sobe, quando desce
quando vêve, quando morre
negro pena, sem pará.

An appreciation for the primitive popular elements may be verified in our Modernism by the extraordinary manner in which an intensive search for folklore has been carried out since 1922. With this in mind, it is worthwhile looking at a letter of Mário de Andrade, in which the author of “Macunaíma” informs Manuel Bandeira, then in Rio de Janeiro, about his activities while collecting folklore in the Northeast: “Ando catimbosando, ouvindo côco, vendo ‘baiano,’ Boi, colhendo Congo, talvez amanhã colherei Fandango tambem inteirinho. Apesar das dificuldades, ja colhi umas 150 melodias. Estou fazendo, aliás, observações bem interessantes sôbre a maneira de cantar da gente de cá.”

SPOKEN LANGUAGE INSTEAD OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

One special aspiration of all true poets through the centuries has been to transpose successfully into poetry the spontaneous, emotive, everyday language which yields the most natural expression of inner truths. In Latin literature, Catullus had aimed at the creation of distinctive poetry in simple language and achieved this ambition. Wordsworth, on the verge of Romanticism, defended this same principle and repeated this accomplishment. The Romantics while beating down the artificial patterns of Classicism and Neoclassicism also attained good poetry with popular rhythms and vocabulary. The Modernists went further, they not only defended the inclusion of all speech peculiarities, but the rhythm of colloquial conversation as well. The Modernists have succeeded many times in creating poetry that expounds wholly the familiar idiom without any disfiguration.

Two examples of this type of poetry, quite diverse in content, are: Carlos Drummond de Andrade's “Tristeza No Ceu” which is outstanding in its natural exposition; then there is “Estrêla da Manhã,” a perfect example of how strictly popular language attains unusual lyrical vehemence.

TRANSFORMING THE PROSAIC INTO POETRY

Before Modernism, the matter of what themes were suitable to poetry was more or less established. It had been dogmatically determined and assured by the consensus of centuries that a poetic theme should be of indisputable beauty or nobility. A woman—when beautiful—roses, stars, birds, lakes, swans, moons, woods, were without question appreciated as poetic content. However, in the same way that Van Gogh's kitchen chair lacked dignity for an academic painter, so would a pair of old shoes—the theme of a sonnet by Mário Quintana—not have merited the interest of a Classic, Romantic, Parnassian or Symbolist poet.

What certain so-called Realists such as Cesário Verde had pioneered, namely, the revelation of poetry in the prosaic, in the vulgar, in the rough, was pushed yet further by the Modernists. At the beginning of the century, Pound had insisted on the basic need for complete liberty in creating poetry. Aesthetic conventions and moral prejudices should not be permitted to erect walls, to prevent the artist from penetrating into broad areas offering fertile poetic ideas. In his very significant essay, “A Escrava que não é Isaura,” which is actually a Poetic for the Modernists, Mário de Andrade clearly explained the problem of a poetic theme. The author of Lira Paulistana affirmed “A poetic theme is the most anti-psychological conclusion extant. The lyric impulse is free, independent of us; independent of our intelligence. It might just as well originate from a string of onions as from lost love. All matters are vital. There are no poetic themes. The Modernists when they destroyed these concepts extirpated the last remaining Romantic element: a taste for the exotic.” And, he had already explained that from this error derived the lamentable dichotomy marking off areas deemed appropriate to poetry on the one hand, and on the other hand, those forbidden and denied. Mário de Andrade says: “What led to the belief that we the ‘modernizers’ were degenerates, idolaters of ugliness, was a silly error due to the unilateralization of beauty. Until the beginning of this century it was believed, most of all by the spectator public, that the beautiful in art was the same as the beautiful in nature. I believe that this is not so. Artistic beauty is a human creation, independent of natural beauty, and it is only now that it is free of this corollary of parallelism to which human ineptitude condemned it.”

Manuel Bandeira, one of the founders of Modernism, has been persistent in illuminating poetry in the commonplace. One of his early poems deals with a “cheap little commercial sculpture,” an old statuette, worn, dirty, mutilated, that inspired him in spite of all that degraded and defaced it, observing that “only that which has suffered is truly alive.”

He was the poet of the retarded in the dusty streets who give hurrying men “a lesson in childhood,” of rooming houses doomed to triviality; of side streets teeming with prostitutes and vagrants; of João Gostoso, free port merchant, and of Misael, public administrator as well as elderly but obstinate lover. Bandeira found in the most humble simple things of life the luminous, ineffable quality called inspiration. The same may be said of Drummond de Andrade who found poetry in places others had not: “Meyer's movie theatre,” “false teeth,” “the golden softness of sweet potatoes.”

EXPERIENCE INSTEAD OF IMITATION

A great part of Academic poetry was a facsimile of Classical poetry. In the case of genuine personal inventiveness, these verses were also influenced by earlier works long since assimilated and forgotten. The Romantics brought the vibrant essence of their lives to poetry, but they almost always limited themselves to their erotic experiences. The Parnassians venerated conventions. In reading most of the works of Bilac and Alberto Oliveira, it is difficult to imagine their personalities. This is not true of the Modernists who tell us in detail who they are and how they relate to things. Modern poetry is based more on life as it moves through homes, through streets, through the poet's experience, rather than on the lessons of the past or on fantasy. Consequently, Modern poetry is not only intensely autobiographical, but also exuberantly individual and new even when not experimental because each human being has within something unique that distinguishes him from all others. And that, I believe, is man's great glory: each individual holding within his soul a minute fraction of dream and anguish which will not be repeated.

While acknowledging that areas of common interest exist among the artists of Modernism—which is logical since each generation shares the same cultural environment—the enormous diversity of their work is self-evident. Mário de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima, Henriqueta Lisboa, Murilo Mendes, Augusto Federico Schmidt, Vinícius de Morais and João Cabral de Melo Neto have a marked individuality, their very own facets. Each of these poets has created his own cosmos, his own language. Each has revealed himself in a graphological way. The work of these artists in verse is more than gratuitous literary composition, or an exercise in distraction, or escapism. First, it concentrates the itinerary of one existence with its sacrifices, adventures, drama, utopias, struggles, humiliations, defeats—finally, everything he experiences in the world. Whitman, a patriarch of Modern poetry stressed the difference between the old poetry and the new when he said about Leaves of Grass: “Whosoever touches this book, touches a man.”

THE FREEDOM TO INVESTIGATE AND THE PATRIMONY OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

Pound's principle of complete freedom in the sector of Art—giving the subconscious the same right to manifestation earlier reserved to consciousness—was earnestly defended by Mário de Andrade who considered this aim as “new, originating with experimental psychology.” He himself gained considerably from this freedom and from the new directions taken by psychology as is indicated in part of this letter written to Manuel Bandeira: “I am wading through experiments and experiments in expression. My present poems from 1922 on, are actually essays exercises, studies. I am searching. I am expecting to find. A quick joy. And doubts. Desolation. Terrible, I write constantly. I have a book ready. O Losango Caqui, impressions of the month of military duty I did in August. I am trying to realize the most psychological poetry (that is) possible. True practical demonstrations. Experimental psychology. One might say scientific poetry.”

Mario de Andrade's poetry never stopped being “psychological,” that is, sensitive to the obscure movements, the incomprehensibles of the interior “I.” That invisibility which he sought in his most ambitious poems in which lyrical words repeated in “discreet and almost always silent antonyms his life and feelings” never eradicated a fixation of inner effervescence. Avoiding tangibility of a realistic form, he brought forth this elusiveness by carefully selecting his terms and in this way creating word play. To sum up, play masking intimate truth. The revelation of a secret which paradoxically should continue being secret.

Manuel Bandeira refers to a group of poems to which his “Noturno da Parada Amorim” belongs, as singularized by “the total break with everyday reality, with the waking world, with any rational form.”

THE UTILIZATION OF POSITIVE TRADITIONS

The biased and resistant idea that Modernism intended to raze all of the positive elements of the past as obsolescent in order to begin anew is already disappearing. There were, in fact, some senseless Futurists who thought that all ties with the past should be broken. Radical vanguardists, they hoped to turn museums into garages. In Brazil as well as in other countries healthy Modernism fought against negative conventions but never against positive ones. Brazilian Modernism rejected the Academic Parnassian school, but appreciated the Romantics, discovered the true greatness of Machado, and restored “Aleijadinho” and colonial architecture to honor. Similarly, in the English-speaking world, Pound and Eliot rediscovered medieval writers and others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were either being misinterpreted or forgotten. Modernism was not the liquidation of the past; on the contrary it should be viewed as a restoration of the vital values which were submerged for centuries as a result of the hegemony of Cartesian rationalism. The Modernists, in almost every case very cultured persons, did not defend certain modernizing processes in art such as free verse and popular idiom through indolence or ignorance. They did so basing themselves on aesthetic principles which were well thought-out and planned.

Near the end of his life when he was interviewed by Homero Senna, Mário de Andrade was able to make a mature consideration about the relationship between modern and ancient poetry. Homero Senna asked: “And what future do you foresee for poetry? Will it become still more free, or will we return to ancient models?” Mario answered: “I believe that it will become increasingly more free, but free in the sense of freedom from schools and exclusive definition. It is this freedom which will allow it to renew as well as the ‘ancient models’ as you have termed them.”

Later, Senna asks yet another question: “Do you consider rhyme and meter to be outside traditional molds?” Mário replies: “Absolutely not. They are eternal forms, as is free verse. Besides I can no longer be against traditional forms after my experience with Lira Paulistana. I have already said that these poems came into being because I permitted myself to be seduced by the poetry of Martim Codax. Because of this many of my poems were influenced by the parallelistic process of Galician-Portuguese; consciously in the beginning, later with greater spontaneity. However, I feel that I have revitalized [this process] … dialectically, if you wish.”

To prove the utilization of the past's valid elements by Brazilian Modernists I need to cite but two examples: the extraordinary revival of the sonnet in Brazil during the last few years and the assimilation of the “form” and lyricism of the medieval “cancioneiros” of which Lira Paulistana endures as one of the outstanding examples.

A TRANSFIGURATIVE VISUALIZATION

The imagination of an individual without life experience is as useless as a movie projector set up with unexposed film. The artist must know, must live reality, not to reproduce it but to express it and transcend it. It is at this point that the contribution of creative fantasy emerges.

Unremitting defenders of their sovereignty over reality, forceful Modern artists did not limit this concept to photography, to reporting or to documentation. To be a poet meant in a singular way to have the capacity for transfiguration. The Modern poet does not separate reality from imagination, as rationalist poets did formerly, but considers imagination a part of reality, and even further, as an instrument for understanding the total reality. The celebration of reality is a frequent theme of Wallace Stevens:

the magnificent cause of being,
the imagination, the one reality,
in this imagined world.

It is interesting to observe that even a dry withdrawn poet glued to facts, such as Drummond de Andrade, can on occasion transcend his material, his Mineiran timidity, and take off on dizzying heights of lyricism which are at once daring and splendid incursions into the kingdom of metamorphosis. For Cassiano Ricardo, the act of seeing and transfiguration are often a single process. Part of Cecilia Meireles' poetic craft was to reveal beauty, create magic and reinvent worlds with her imagination. And Mario Quintana's spectral frigate with its “ivory masts, silver sails,” teeming with dead children, will wander forever over “phantasmagoric oceans.”

THE ROLE OF HUMOR

Before Modernism, humor was thought incompatible with lyricism in the same way that matter deemed vulgar was denied poetical expression. The so-called humorous poetry as written at the turn of the century in Brazil by Bastos Tigre and other second-rate writers was considered an inferior genre. Excepting the sentimental yet ironic poetry of Alvares de Azevedo, humor and lyricism rarely met. The carte blanche policy proclaimed by the Modernists which facilitated the interpenetration of literary genres and moods also made possible the alliance of humor and lyricism. There are traces of humor in today's lyric poetry which somewhat unbalance its totality. Mário de Andrade deployed the recourse of humor throughout his writing career. Of course, this is not true of every poem. Not in the very intimate evanescent ones, the muted poems he termed “invisible.” However, there is comedy in the satiric parts of “Paulicéia Desvairada.” And in “Danças” I like these provocative verses, “What are we? Personal pronouns.” In “Noturno de Belo-Horizonte” we read: “Among the roses, the policeman … Where he isn't needed, as usual. …” Oswald de Andrade was the charming author of poems that are really caricatures, cartoons, actually. Manuel Bandeira who termed himself a “big sentimentalist” showed no disdain for the humor pervading a great part of his work. He reacts jocularly to carnal attraction in “Balada das Tres Mulheres do Sabonete Araxá” and in “Rondo do Palace Hotel.” I believe that the finest harmony between lyricism and humor was achieved by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Even in dramatic poems such as “Morte de Leittiro” the whimsical blends perfectly with the other elements in the poem. Humor predominates in the first phase of his work. Later, Drummond de Andrade derived comic effects from the demoralizing attack on conventional sentimentality. I have already mentioned in previous appraisals two examples typical of this phase, but they are worth repeating:

Na horta, o lugar do Natal abençoava os legumes …

and

Que coisa maravilhosa é o amor!
(O amor e outros produtos!)

Murilo Mendes, from Juiz de Fora in the state of Minas, distinguished himself as one of the best exponents of Cariocan humor. Today, this type of humor is validated in the best creative efforts of Vinícius de Morais, one of Brazil's most vibrant and versatile poets. One of his happiest achievements is “Tragédia Passional, Hollywood, California” in which a Brazilian satirizes with verve a particularly American attitude towards love.

THE THEORY OF THE BRAZILIAN AS A CORDIAL MAN LINKED TO THE VISION OF BRAZIL AS A LAND OF PARADISE

Ribeiro Couto was the one who popularized the theory of the Brazilian as a “cordial man,” and consequently, that of Brazil as a place of easy-going human relationships and affectionate conviviality, a vision rather close to Paradise. But, we know only too well that one of the greatest afflictions of Man lies in the lack of understanding of his neighbor, or even in hatred. (Hell is other people, affirmed Sarte.) Cassiano Ricardo in his “Ode Ao Homem Cordial” elaborates on this theory in verse:

Não sou cordial
de salão, nem apenas no fecho das cartas,
Nem sou cordial como os políticos
que se entredevoram cordialmente.
Sou cordial por herança,
pois a nossa democracia está na alegria
dos grandes espaços.
Está na chícara de café que me oferecem.
Está nos olhos verdes da húngara que eu amo.
Está no testamento em que meu pai
mandou distribuir uma deixa singela
e amorosa
a mais pobre orfã que se encontrar na fazenda.
Está no jeito de conversar, está na desconversa
lírica prá não magoar, pra não dizer a verdade.
Está na insônia que me causa a notícia de que
uma criatura, lá longe (outro clima, outra
psicologia)
vai se sentar numa cadeira elétrica.
Está no causo, na meação, no trabalho em comum,
nas ações entre amigos, nas revoluções que
terminam em festa.

And the long poem ends with this question: “Wouldn't a bit of Brazil in the hearts of agitated men be a solution?”

Mário de Andrade in his poem “Manhã” also proposes this solution of ingenuousness and fraternity. In the silence of a village square, he wants to meet Lenin, Carlos Prestes, Gandhi, someone like that. Let us see why:

Na doçura da manhã quase acabada
Eu lhes falava cordialmente: Se abanquem um bocadinho.
E havia de contar prá êles os nomes dos nossos peixes,
ou descrevia Ouro Preto, a entrada de Vitória, Marajó.
Coisa assim que pusesse um disfarce de festa
No pensamento dessas tempestades de homens.

In “Noturno de Belo-Horizonte,” Mário cried: “Não prego a guerra nem a paz, eu peço amor,” and he later proffers the reverbating verse: “Nós somos na Terra, o grande milagre do amor!”

In his philosophy of Cannibalism, Oswald de Andrade preached the great synthesis of the primitive soul with the miracle of modern technology to achieve the ultimate Utopia on Earth.

A solution of tenderness and simplicity has found its most perfect expression in a book recently published in Brazil, after being a long time in the writing. I refer to Aníbal Machado's Jóão Ternura, a novel of lyric prose, rather more anthropophagous in nature than surrealistic.

I will end this unpretentious talk which I had hoped to make as pleasant and intimate as a chat on the veranda of a Brazilian home (actually, I am speaking in a Brazilian home), by reading a short selection from the last pages of João Ternura:

Ternura had always had the hope and illusion that once dead, he would still be able to look about for a few years. Eyes open, but without the right to life. … Just to be able to see without being seen. One eye, observing.

He would hide behind Serra do Mar. Be there for years, waiting for the future. He wanted to see the waves of new generations and the growth of Brazil. Material progress would mean the greatness of his people. Nature conquered, men, simple and cordial, free from exploitation and fear.