4 - Brazilian poetry from 1878 to 1902

Summary

Although romantic poetry continued to be cultivated during the 1870s, it was showing signs of weariness, and a new poetic discourse began to emerge in reaction to it. In 1870, Silvio Romero (1851–1914) published a series of articles – later collected in the fourth volume of the third edition of his Historia da literatura brasileira (5 vols., 1943) – in Grenqa, a Recife newspaper. In those articles, Romero attacked “the exaggerated senti-mentalism and the decrepit Indianism of the Harpejos poeticos of Santa Helena Magno, the stentorian Hugoanism of Castro Alves’ Espumas flutuantes, the subjectivist lyricism and the pretentious humor of the Falenas of Machado de Assis.” This reaction against Romanticism rapidly acquired republican and anti-monarchist overtones, visible as early as 1872 in the Névoas matutinas (Rio de Janeiro) of Lúcio de Mendonca (1854–1909).

While not the direct causes of these changes, the erotic poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the 1865 Coimbra Question (a dispute between hardened Romantics and the academic generation of Coimbra, known for its revolutionary ideas), and the secretive realist lectures given at the Lisbon Casino in 1871 all greatly stimulated the poetic metamorphosis taking place in Brazil during the 1870s.

The year 1878 was a true watershed. Inspired by what he called “philosophical conceptualism” and “scientific poetry,” Sílvio Romero published his Cantos do fim do seculo in Rio de Janeiro. The fact that Romero’s poetry did not completely match the postulates he had set forth in 1870 was duly noted by Machado de Assis (1839–1908) in “A nova geração” (published in the Revista Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, no. 2, Dec. 1, 1879), his famous study summing up the new generation.