Modernist Dialogues: The Presence of Mario de Andrade in the Poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade of the 1940s

• Grant number: 12/08474-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2012
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Fabio Akcelrud Durão
• Grantee: Leandro Pasini
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The works of Mario de Andrade, specifically his poetical works, accumulated, thorough the Modernist Movement (1922-1945), problems and formulations that, in someway, mapped the movement and made it recognizable. In such configuration of Modernism, in which Mario occupies a central position - together with another writers, like Oswald de Andrade -, there is, notwithstanding, the decisive presence of his interlocutors. In the poetical field they are, specially, Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Of these dialogues result particular poetical elaborations, that compose a group of works with close relations and similar problems. Beginning in the 1920s, these dialogues, presented mainly, but not exclusively, in the letters of the poets, recover a new breath in the 1940s. At the end of the Modernist cycle (approximately between 1940 and 1945), we can verify the force that this dialogue between Mario and Drummond acquires, bringing to the first plan the debate about the social and aesthetic value of poetry, the commitment ant the social place of the poet. This dialogue is incorporated in key works of the period, as Mario's the lecture "O Movimento Modernista" (1942) and Drummonds chronicles of Confissões de Minas (1944), as well as, and most importantly, in the poem "A Meditação sobre o Tietê" (1945), of Mario, and in the book of poems A rosa do povo (1945), of Drummond, that is recognized as a culmination of the work of the poet and of the whole Modernist Movement. To inquire the nature, the connections and the consequences of this dialogue between Mario and Drummond may lead to a reinterpretation of the Brazilian modernist poetry seen from its internal relations, in which the Brazilian problems and the artistical and political programmes of the international avant-garde are filtered by specific and consistent poetical works and political positions.