[In the following essay, Martins explains Drummond's vision of modernism and notes the popular and critical attention the poet has received.]

To a large extent, the work of Carlos Drummond de Andrade is the poetic legacy of modernismo.¹ Born in 1902, he published his first volume of verse, Alguma poesia (Some Poetry), in 1930; others, like Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968) and Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), came from that noman's-land sometimes called pré-modernismo, which means that they had to make the revolution and to fight at the barricades. Not so with Carlos Drummond de Andrade; for him modernismo was a war already won, and the only task left was to occupy and explore the conquered territories—which he did, masterfully.

Of course, he is much more than a faithful follower and an adherent; it would be more correct to see him as one of the Apostles who went about spreading the Message. All these theological metaphors are authorized by Mário de Andrade, who christened Manuel Bandeira as “modernismo's Saint John the Baptist”; if that is true, Drummond has been its Beloved Son in whom the gods of literature are well pleased. In fact, being anti-Brazilian, or at least a-Brazilian, in some aspects (his introversion and reserve, his horror of rhetoric and bombast), he is on the other hand eminently Brazilian, with an acute eye for the ridicule, steely irony, skepticism tempered by tenderness and vice-versa and, above all, his flawless congeniality to the complex and contradictory state of mind and soul that is “to be Brazilian.”

Although he wrote in one of his arts poétiques, “Do not make lines out of events,” it is impossible to dissociate his poetry from the “events” of literary and social history since 1922. Not that he took facts as themes, but in the sense that facts created an atmosphere, intellectual and emotional, which reflected and certainly conditioned the “atmosphere” of his poetry. His career, like Roman highways, is marked with successive milestones that signal not only the journey and the distance but also, in this case, the landscape. Each one of his main volumes corresponds to a particular moment in the history and evolution of literary principles and moral concepts. In 1930 Alguma poesia was the book of victorious modernismo and the no less victorious inauguration of the Second Republic. Times were ripe for simplicity and directness of expression, for snapshots of the “real Brazil,” for tireless exercises in self-criticism, for repudiation of the past and for the poetry of the common man (both as author and reader).

Everything was clear and familiar, or was it? Under the species of the poem “In the Middle of the Road” the closet's skeleton was found in one room of the colonial house, spotlighted by the brilliant tropical sun and incredibly fascinating. Unexpectedly, it caught the imagination of the readers, rejected the everyday poetry of the volume and gave it its “real” meaning.

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.
Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

(Elizabeth Bishop, tr.)

What in the world could that possibly mean? Written about 1925—that is, at the very beginning of Drummond's career—the poem anticipated and announced (which, of course, no one could have known at the time) the hermeticism of Brazilian poetry in the 1930s and 40s and beyond, represented in his own work by Claro enigma (Clear Enigma; 1951). Meanwhile, all the philistines had their day: roaring laughter was heard all over the country, and everyone proposed a mock explanation, going from pure and simple mental derangement to the very well-known writer's urge to baffle the bourgeois. Later on, with good humor and superlative cunning, the author himself would write the history of the whole episode in Uma pedra no meio do caminho: Biografia de um poema (A Stone in the Middle of the Road: Biography of a Poem; Rio de Janeiro, 1967).

The Second Republic, in literature as well as in politics, was rapidly disintegrating, however, as Sentimento do mundo (Sense of the World; 1940), with the first intrusion of “events,” showed with insistent urgency. The war was there, and “the war was in us” (to recall the title of Marques Rebelo's novel); Drummond was no longer the parochial dweller of the small Brejo das almas (Morass of Souls; 1934), in the State of Minas Gerais, but a citizen of the world. Long before Marshall McLuhan, poets were aware of the global village; polarized to the right and the left, Brazilian intellectuals fought with words the same war others were fighting with swords; Drummond entered the second phase of his career as a poet, going through a process of ever-increasing sympathy with socialist ideas without ever accepting full regimentation in any extremist party.

One may even consider the whole episode a misunderstanding in semantics: since the political situation of the time was viewed and felt as “fascist,” to oppose it was inevitably to seem “leftist”; later on, when the unfathomable political interests made strange bedfellows of democracy and communism, it was only normal, if somewhat naïve, to celebrate Russian resistance against Nazism. In all that, we must keep in mind the peculiarity of the Brazilian situation: Drummond was, ideologically, sincerely and openly opposed to the regime, while at the same time being one of its high officials (Director of the Cabinet in the Ministry of Education); and when the Communist Party stormed an election for the board of the recently formed Writers Guild (Associação Brasileira de Escritores), likewise seen as a center of political opposition, Drummond and many others resigned immediately.

This resignation, along with general trends in poetry (the replacement of Modernist generations by the so-called Generation of '45), signaled Drummond's gradual but steadfast withdrawal from “events” and correspondent immersion in personal, emotionally autobiographical and hermetic poetry. The consequence was a period of “pure poetry,” if we can it that, represented by Claro enigma. It must be noted, however, that, having developed his poetry in progressively transcending stages, Drummond never disavowed any of his successive selves, integrating each instead into the next. This is well documented by the opera omnia that symbolically close each period. In 1942 Poesias marked the end of the properly Modernist poetry of Alguma poesia and Brejo das almas (including Sentimento do mundo, which, as noted, responded to a new line of inspiration); in 1948 Poesia até agora (Poetry until Now) did the same for all the preceding books, including A rosa do povo (The People's Rose), whose nature and character of political “engagement” corresponded symmetrically to Sentimento do mundo.

What comes next is Claro enigma, i.e. the surpassing of both Modernist poetry (nationalist, picturesque, colloquial) and ideological verse (ephemeral, journalistic, partisan) in favor of broader concepts: man and his fate, literature as a reality in its own right. But the dialectics of Drummond's spirit demanded that he “reintegrate” this world of abstractions and pure intellectual hedonism into his national roots and his own personal origins—and the next opera omnia was called Fazendeiro do ar & poesia até agora (Farmer of the Clouds and Poetry until Now; 1953). Why “farmer of the clouds”? One might think that that title, in light of the foregoing poetic corpus, suggests a new state of mind, something like Drummond's petit testament, a sardonic admission of failure in the struggle for the goods of this world. In fact, it points to the permanent obsession of his poetry: namely, a mythical past forever lost in the fog of memory, the dearly departed in their dusty frock coats, family albums where Time has left the yellowed footprints of its passage, Minas Gerais and its old ghosts floating in almost inaudible murmurs of incomprehensible voices. As early as Sentimento do mundo (1940), in the extraordinary poem “Confidência do itabirano,” Drummond had intoned, like a phrase in a symphony, the theme of the “farmer of clouds”: “I owned gold, and cattle, and plantations. Now I am a bureaucrat.” The full emotional impact of those lines can only be felt and appreciated within the context of a semantic antagonism extremely acute in the conscience of Brazilians, the antagonism that opposes the nobility of the gentleman farmer to the petty nature of bureaucratic work.

Thus there is a strong central current that unifies and nourishes the whole of Drummond's work, beyond and above all the changes of inspiration and esthetic concepts it went through along the years. The sardonic fairy leaning over his cradle cast an evil spell on him but also traced the outline of his career: “Go, Carlos, and be awkward in life.” The poet himself does not see his own successive avatars as so many variations in poetic personality, but rather likes to have them organized in clusters of large thematic lines. Editing his own anthology in 1962, he intended it to be a “faithful mirror,” reflecting “certain characteristics, preoccupations and tendencies” that “condition or define” his work as a whole. Chronological order seemed to him less significative than the nine psychological “sections”: 1) the individual, 2) the land, 3) family, 4) friends, 5) the impact of society, 6) carnal knowledge, 7) poetry proper, 8) playful exercises and 9) the existential vision or an attempt at one.

If we accept that view—and, provided the other is not excluded, there is no reason why we shouldn't—Drummond's poetics developed like a complex living organism, continually incorporating without really rejecting its successive ages and stages. It is not unreasonable to think that Drummond considered his poetic work substantially complete in 1953, for thereafter not only were his subsequent books, in a sense, minor ones and mostly in prose, but the opera omnia of the later years bore the “neutral” titles Poemas (1959) and Reunião (1967; 7th ed., 1976)—to which we may add, for the record, Obra completa (1964) and Poesia completa e prosa (1973).

Drummond's celebrated irony is in fact a defense against emotion, particularly against sentimental pathos. Brazilian readers were never fooled by that, and what touches them deeply is the submerged strain of melancholy, even despair and anguish, that pervades the whole work. But irony takes care of all that. Life is what it is—no use for grand gestures or solemn proclamations on the mountain. All of Drummond's work could be interpreted in that perspective, if we take as a springboard the two final strophes of “Poem of Seven Faces.” Here is one of them, including a second-degree irony, since it is also a mock reference to Tomás Antônio Gonzaga (1744-1810), one of the greatest lyric poets in the Portuguese language.

Mundo mundo vasto mundo
se eu me chamasse Raimundo
seria uma rima, não seria uma solução.

This of course loses its pun in translation.

World, world, vast world,
if my name was Twirled
it'd be a rhyme, it wouldn't be a solution.

(John Nist, tr.)

The unfortunate Gonzaga wrote to his beloved Marília, “Eu tenho o coração maior que o mundo” (My heart is larger than the world), to which Drummond pinned the ridicule of a “Raimundo” that, besides being a perfect rhyme, is also a proper name generally associated with black slaves in old colonial Brazil. He goes even further: his heart is, in fact, at least as large as Gonzaga's: “World, world, vast world, / even vaster is my heart.” But at this point he perceives the danger of oversentimentality lurking behind every word; the situation is getting out of hand, the ambiance is pushing him to tears, like a good old romantic poet; so the best course is to find another explanation for this moment of weakness.

I shouldn't tell you
but this moon
but this cognac
shake a person up like hell.

Drummond's critical status is privileged too; not only is he one of the rare poets about whom all judgments that count are favorable, but he has also attained an uncommon audience in the public at large—due in part, it must be said, to his regular column in one of Rio de Janeiro's leading newspapers. Aside from innumerable articles and essays in books, magazines, literary histories and the like, his work has been the subject of very sophisticated analyses by a number of specialists: Oton Moacir Garcia (Palavra puxa palavra, 1955), Hélcio Martins (A rima na poesia de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 1968), Emanuel de Morais (Drummond rima itabira mundo, 1972), Afonso Romano de Santana (Drummond, o “Gaúche” no tempo, 1972), Joaquim-Francisco Coelho (Terra e família na poesia de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 1973) and Gilberto Mendonça Teles (Drummond: A estilística da repetição, 2nd ed., 1976), to name only a few. Today Drummond is unquestionably the dean of Brazilian poetry. The singularity of his situation can be well evaluated by the fact that it could not be challenged, even remotely, by any of the younger poets or by the clutches of the more or less indistinguishable ones regimented under the banner of such collective enterprises such as concretism, praxism and the like.

Note

1. On Brazilian modernismo see Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea, Jack E. Tomlins, tr., New York, New York University Press, 1970. Selections of Drummond's poetry in English are easily accessible in Carlos Drummond de Andrade, In the Middle of the Road: Selected Poems, John Nist, ed. & tr., Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1965; Elizabeth Bishop, Emanuel Brasil, eds., An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, Middletown, Cn., Wesleyan University Press, 1972; and José Neistein, ed., Poesia brasileira moderna: A Bilingual Anthology, Manoel Cardozo, tr., Washington, D.C., Brazilian-American Cultural Institute, 1972, Moreover, Drummond has twice been nominated for WLT's biennial ＄10,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature: in 1972 by Jorge de Sena (see accompanying essay), and in 1978 by Brazilian critic Antônio Cândido.