[Carlos Drummond de Andrade] is probably the most important poet writing at this time in Brazil. Out of his humor and irony, Drummond continues to compose with a curious juxtaposition of the scholarly word with the vulgar. It is especially in his poetry that modern Brazilian literature has achieved the ennoblement of regionalistic and popular expressions. As a master of the delayed cultural envelope, the interpretative reference, Drummond delights in partial and temporary obscurity before everything becomes clear by the last line. His fellow countrymen enjoy in his poetry the following qualities also: sensuous correspondences, synaesthesias, apparent contradictions, anthropomorphizations, dehumanizations, objectifications of the abstract, and subjectifications of the concrete. But far more impressive than any technical virtuosity displayed in his poetry is Drummond's utterly courageous and incorruptible honesty with the human situation, the word, and himself.

Although he lacks the lyric gusto and dazzling verbal mastery of Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond takes the prize from his elder in social consciousness, in the sense of being vitally involved in the deeper contemporary issues of life. From this involvement Drummond refuses to play the role of the romantic, the gossip monger, the decadent, or the escapist. It is from this sense of social involvement, furthermore, that Drummond in his honesty to the word has become the much-needed and much-admired professor of aesthetics to the younger Brazilian writers of his own time and for those who will create in the Portuguese language long after he is dead. In "Search for Poetry," undoubtedly the most remarkable poem about the writing of poetry in the history of Brazilian literature, a work that for its nation has the same cultural importance as Whitman's "By Blue Ontario's Shore" has for the United States, Carlos Drummond de Andrade tells the young poet to beware of confusing art with personal history or with the doctrine of self-expression. The sound advice in "Search for Poetry" is part of a criticism that defines poetry as a language art rather than as an overflow of powerful feelings, whether recollected in tranquillity or otherwise. And in a nation that prides itself on poetic sentiment, it is good to have the sober voice of Drummond to remind immature sensibilities that artistic dedication and achievement involve more than merely putting a pen to paper and letting the ink run. (pp. 247-48)