Visionary lyricism, melancholy and sublime in Claro Enigma, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

• Grant number: 17/13079-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: September 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Fabiano Rodrigo da Silva Santos
• Grantee: Maria Luiza Silva Fialho
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present research aims to consider the composition of visionary lyricism and the development of the melancholic theme from the perspective of the sublime in Claro Enigma, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. The choice of these three thematic and expressionist elements is due to the fact that Claro Enigma seems to present them through a system of integrated expression, involving images that denote desolation, impossibility of transcendence and probing of the mystery that surrounds the world, as a form to represent the insufficiency of poetic expression and the conflict between immanent reality and an inaccessible transcendent world. The lyrical ego of Claro Enigma, probably aware of modern phenomena such as metaphysical sterility, the decline of the ideal, and the overthrow of utopias, seems to clothe itself with the mask of the visionary, subjecting history to melancholy gaze so as to point to the lost or hidden ideals behind the facade of ordinary reality. Thus the poetry of the work has a sublime diction in which silence, the realization of emptiness and the rejection of the transcendent, paradoxically, lead to a reflection on the ideal and the absolute, which are preserved as an enigma. To avoid the revelation of the enigma, as seems to make the lyrical self of Claro Enigma, seems to be a strategy to claim the enchantment to the poetic language in a disenchanted world, which would justify the return of clear enigma eyes to expensive motives to romantic mystical poetry, like that of the visionary poet, that of melancholy and the sublime, elements which in the past represented the search for the romantic by transcendence via poetry. It is assumed here that the way in which Claro Enigma develops the expression of visionism, melancholy and sublime contributes to the singularity with which the work appears both in the plane of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry and in that of Brazilian modernist lyricism. (AU)