[In the following review of Nova Reunião, Gledson acknowledges the difficulty of classifying the poet's work into simple categories and discusses the relative lack of familiarity with Drummond in North America.]

In October 1982, when Carlos Drummond de Andrade had his eightieth birthday, the public celebrations—balloons over Copacabana beach, poems showered from the air over Belo Horizonte, the capital of his native state, as well as more conventional newspaper and television adulation—might have found some echo outside Brazil. They found very little, and the loss is all our own. Drummond (pronounced Drummónd, the name he is known by, and whose origins in Brazil go back through the history of the Portuguese empire) has, I should have thought, an unassailable claim to be thought of as the greatest poet still living and writing in Latin America. These two large volumes—955 pages of poetry, nineteen collections, nearly a thousand poems—contain all the poetry he has thought worthy of publication in book form, apart from some volumes of occasional and journalistic verse, which are given in selection at the end of the second volume.

Why has Drummond not achieved the fame of Neruda, Vallejo or Paz, say? The answers tell us something about ourselves as readers of poetry, and as “consumers” of news and views about Latin America. The places and situations he deals with are far too like our own. Itabira, the small interior town where he was brought up, and whose social life preoccupies him so much in three relatively recent collections together entitled Boitempo (Oxtime) was, at least in many respects, like any small British country town of the early part of the century. Equally, the Rio de Janeiro he now inhabits, and which is the setting of the poems of collections of the 1940s like Sentimento do Mundo (A Feeling of the World) and A Rosa do Povo (The People's Rose) is not essentially different from any other large city. Is it that we like our own poetry to be illuminatingly familiar (Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop …) but still at bottom require exoticism from those writing in foreign languages? In fact Bishop, whose poetry about Brazil (the fruit of twenty years' familiarity with the country) shows so much genuine understanding and fellow-feeling for the country and its inhabitants, was a great admirer and a fine translator of Drummond's poetry—her versions are still the best approach-road for the English-speaking reader, though the much larger selection of Virginia de Araujo (The Minus Sign, Manchester, 1981) is accurate and often ingenious.

Drummond's poetry is so varied both in form and theme that it is impossible to give a representative sample of it; he is, and always has been, confident without being over-bearing, so that themes about which we thought we had heard everything—social commitment and class guilt, love, nostalgia for the past—are given new life. Indeed, along with a very few other poets of Brazilian modernism, of whom the most considerable was Manuel Bandeira, he has given expression to everyday feelings—and it is, in the last resort, this which explains the public enthusiasm (and Bishop's). His permanent scepticism and irony give validity to this emotional expression, for he never (or almost never) claims too much. “I give minimal hope to a few”, as he says in A Rosa do Povo (1945), the most confident collection of his career, whose climax is the magnificent “Song to the man of the people, Charlie Chaplin,” a hymn to the ability of ordinary man (and of the artist in particular) to escape pre-established codes of communication and reach a common humanity. “Cisma” (“Staring”) is a childhood memory from the first volume of Boitempo (1968); it balances joy and menace in a frozen moment, as if the poet were unable to decide between them (the translation is my own):

This coffee-bush, only one, in the clear afternoon and its shadow, a child's shadow, thrown
                    among red globules.
                    Sitting, I see the world
open and reopen its fan of images.
What luxury, to live in time and out of it.
Look, coming slowly down the trunk, to sink,
staring, into my dream, the total dream,
ecstatic sculptured band, a coral-snake.

Drummond's original commitment (in 1930), with a book simply entitled Alguma Poesia (Some Poetry), was to irony and minimal statement, and that irony has remained constant in his later career. The development of a cutting edge so soon might have been dangerous—for irony is an instrument which can easily become blunted with use, or self-destructive when turned on the user. The truth is that Drummond was always aware of such problems, and never assumed ironic positions lightly; an article written as early as 1924 savaged Anatole France for purveying comfortable scepticism. But this mixture of wisdom and modesty has made his poetry a difficult inheritance for his successors to assimilate; the best poet of the succeeding generations is João Cabral de Melo Neto, whose sharp, precisely calculated realism avoids any autobiographical reference, where Drummond has always written overtly from his own point of view.

To quote a phrase from Cabral, Drummond is an “inconformado conformista”: like Machado de Assis—a writer who has also proved notoriously difficult for succeeding generations to tame—and such other great figures of Brazilian literature as Graciliano Ramos and Guimarães Rosa, he is forced to a tragic and ironic realism by his critique of a society from which, nevertheless, he refuses to exile himself. Like Machado again, Drummond has never left South America. In this attitude to exile, of which Drummond's popularity is one form, lies, I suspect, one of the fundamental differences between the Brazilian and Spanish American literary traditions.