[The keynote of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's first volume of poetry], and to a great extent the keynote of [his] poetry to the present, can be isolated in the first lyric from Alguma Poesia, "Poema de sete faces." Here Drummond expresses the impossibility of reconciling his own values with those of the world. This dissonance, this friction between systems, not even a perfect rhyme will remedy, and there is no choice but to be "gauche." (p. 58)

While Drummond does not find in perfect rhyme the magic link with which to resolve the differences between the individual and his wasted spiritual ecology—finds it, in fact, a pseudo-solution—he never wholly gave up various kinds of formal patterning. (p. 59)

What was never clear during the early years of modernism, what was blurred by both proximity and polemic, now with hindsight becomes much clearer. From the beginning Drummond attempted to harmonize the liberating impulse of free verse with his personal passion for order and pattern. This attempt was not unique to him. It can be identified even more easily in the work of his friend and compatriot Manuel Bandeira, who was even more reluctant to burn away his own past, and who even accepted the mantle of unofficial laureate. Both poets sought a kind of modus vivendi cum aggiornamento which would not require that they reject violently their personal pre-modernist values. (p. 61)

In a real sense, Drummond and Bandeira oscillated between past and present, between traditional and formal postures and the poetic politics of their own time. Occasionally, and more frequently with increasing age, Drummond placed the poetics of modernism at the service of the shining human scenes he had lost [as in "Country Places" ("Estancias")]…. Here the liberation from conventional syntax makes possible the memory, and the memory is redemptive: only through it can the dead "live with us," "stay with us," "burn in us … as the flame which sleeps in the logs thrown in the shed" already burns, because it will burn, and because (in this poem at least) time is no prison. And love is the energy that moves one to remember.

Such an intimate connection of love and memory often makes Drummond an erotic poet of great intensity, and no manifestation of love, however bitter or base, could be strange to him who must keep himself alive as the savage link in his own bloodline, for love's sake. One of his most moving poems ["Rape" ("Rapta")], written in regular decasyllabic lines, relives the myth of Ganymede. This is not Goethe's Ganymede, however, who sought the figure of the transcendental father; here the homosexuality is neither skimmed over nor judged, and the bitterness of the experience is negated only by the heroic form itself. (pp. 61-2)

The association of the boy Ganymede with "pure form" which "freely degrades itself" and the declaration that after debasement he is pure form which rises "more perfect" yet … may also be read as an allegory of Drummond's own experience…. Pure form must be subjected to the agony of knowledge which is imparted in the vast world, in the "wide design / of Nature, the ambiguous, the reticent," and will receive in exchange

                    double strands of bitterness,
          harshness of love lodged in a hard caress,

—as accurate a description of life as poet has ever proposed. (p. 63)