[In the following review, Merquior places A Paixão Medida in the context of Drummond's earlier work and discusses the poet's use of a particular metrical form.]

Drummond de Andrade (b 1902) and João Cabral (b 1920) are the two foremost living Brazilian poets, and well known and influential in the world of Iberian literature at large. A Paixão Medida (The Measured Passion) and A Escola das Facas (The School of Knives) are their latest collections to be published.

Drummond's poetic career began in 1930 and the seventeen volumes he has brought out since then are generally considered the richest in Brazilian poetry. A scion of the Minas Gerais gentry, he became a conscientious civil servant, and during the eventful 1930s and 40s cast an ironic, caustic look at both his native mining town of Itabira, and at middle class Rio. This enfant du siècle, indeed, has played the role of a tropical Baudelaire, in being the first Brazilian poet fully to grasp the ambiguous poetry of modern city life, in its bearing on human emotions. For all his rebellious, love-hate attitude towards the patriarchal order, Drummond's verse has had from the outset a uniquely wry humour, and he is wonderfully adept at avoiding facile sentimentality, in his intimate lyrics as well as in his more public modes. His first books were the most disturbing among the works of Brazilian modernism—an aesthetics to which he was profoundly loyal as a result of his friendship with Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), the indefatigable leader of the modernist movement in Sao Paulo.

By the close of the Second World War, the intractable individualist in Drummond turned out also to be an accomplished social poet. A Rosa do Povo (1945) showed him to excel both as a libertarian, left-wing social critic and as a celebrator of social values: it includes fine war poems, an outstanding ode to Charlie Chaplin, a shrewd consideration of the paradoxes of commitment on the part of a bourgeois intellectual, probing exercises in “metapoetics” and several philosophical pieces—the soul-searching of a middle-aged unbeliever increasingly obsessed by love, time and death. Characteristically, however, this metaphysical bent, which dominated Drummond's poetry in the 1950s, did not lead him to embrace any secular or religious creed, or private mythology; the poet as prophet was to remain a role definitely alien to him.

The harsh verse of his beginnings gradually gave way to a mellower manner and a subtler psychological line no longer inimical to metre and rhyme. In his “metaphysical” period, the wildly heterogeneous vocabulary of his avant-garde days was subdued in favour of a kind of classicism. But Drummond has kept consistently away from high modernism in his refusal to conceive of literature as gnosis or to indulge in a poetics of obscurity. Similarly, he has avoided that “collapse of selfhood” so conspicuous in radical modern verse; unlike Fernando Pessoa, the central voice in early modern Iberian poetry, he has never employed personae. Largely thanks to Drummond, indeed, Brazilian poetry has preserved a healthy balance between avant-garde techniques and accessibility to the ordinary educated reader, a balance which fulfils the promise of replacing literature as ornament (a stubborn tradition among Iberian societies) by a literature both devised and experienced as Auden's “game of knowledge”.

In the past ten to twelve years, Drummond's verse has acquired a pendular rhythm as it were, oscillating between an often comic memorial vein (the Boitempo trilogy) and a reprise of his philosophical concerns, mainly in connection with erotic predicaments. The mystery of carnal love provides the main subject-matter of A Paixão Medida, the “measure” in whose title seems to refer less to an attribute of passion than to the skilful metrics of the poems themselves. With more than one nod to Camões—the quintessential interpreter of frustrated sexual desire in Portuguese—but also to other masters of the sonnet, such as Claudio Manuel da Costa (1729-1789) or Antero de Quental (1842-1890), Drummond greatly enriches his own already impressive contribution to this verse form, earnestly and admirably cultivated by him since he achieved an elegant neo-baroque style in Claro Enigma (Clear Enigma, 1951). In this collection, he evinces a truly Yeatsian poignancy, as he sets the pangs of eros in old age to the music of the hendecasyllable, the classic measure of Portuguese prosody.