All about Walt Whitman

Section 3.4 of my dissertation is on: parallelism, enumeration, catalogues (Bible and Greek epics), and meter and the transposition of Leaves of Grass to Portuguese.


Gay Wilson Allen, who wrote the introduction to the Signet Classic edition and is the author of The Solitary Singer (1955), one of the best biographies of Whitman, an infinite source of factual and critical information on the life and career of the American poet, year by year, adds that “Whitman anticipated some of the most vital poetic techniques […] of the twentieth century” (WHITMAN, 2000, p.xxi) and has “genuine esthetic achievements” (2000, p.xix), such as his “panoramic, unending” (p. xx) flow of images, the “montage” technique that is so typical of modern poetry, based on his “basic prosodic form”, and the parallelism of structure, for which the Bible, or “ancient Hebraic verse” (p.xix), which represents in verse his social equalitarianism, is one of the sources. The best thing to do in such cases is to bring the very word of the poet about the matter under discussion, so that we can easily notice the influence of the Bible on his writing. This excerpt from “The Bible As Poetry”, from November Boughs, will do:

Compared with the famed epics of Greece, and lesser ones since, the spinal supports of the Bible are simple and meagre. All its history, biography, narratives, etc., are as beads, strung on and indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power. Yet with only deepest faith for impetus, and such Deific purpose for palpable or impalpable theme, it often transcends the masterpieces of Hellas, and all masterpieces. The metaphors daring beyond account, the lawless soul, extravagant by our standards, the glow of love and friendship, the fervent kiss—nothing in argument or logic, but unsurpass’d in proverbs, in religious ecstacy, in suggestions of common mortality and death, man’s great equalizers—the spirit everything, the ceremonies and forms of the churches nothing, faith limitless, its immense sensuousness immensely spiritual—an incredible, all-inclusive non-worldliness and dew-scented illiteracy (the antipodes of our Nineteenth Century business absorption and morbid refinement) […] (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1164).

The montage technique[1] is a juxtaposition of pictures, like a succession of shots in a movie, “as beads, strung on and indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power”, which was applied in modern poetry by deleting the linking words and arranging the verses in chains of independent utterances. Allen goes on to point out that this use of parallelism, which is employed also for another purpose, enumeration, comes from the fact that Whitman had a “vicarious [empathic] desire to embrace the physical world” (WHITMAN, 2000, p. xx), incorporating in his poetry the then recent awareness of Americans of their own country, in a time when “everyone was trying to grasp the significance of the continental expanse of the new nation” (p. xx). So, this gigantic “space-consciousness” (p. xx), which could not be conveyed within the fixed forms of traditional poetry, appears in long poems made up of free verses, such as those at the beginning of “Out of the Cradle”, along one single sentence of twenty two lines, the poetic equivalent of his “empathy for space and movement” (p. xx) in syntactical structure.

In order to explore this subject more deeply, we will discuss now the use of parallelism of structure for the purpose of enumeration, which was Whitman’s attempt to include the whole of North America in his poems. This led him to the creation of the catalogues in the Leaves. Next, we will provide an example of Whitman’s flow of images and a description of meter, or versification, in English and Portuguese, so that we can have an idea of our work of poetic re-creation. As for the catalogues, they are another example of Whitman’s capacity for appropriating ancient symbols or poetic structures to validate his poetry by re-working the past to renew the present, mingling into a single expression the old and the new, and giving them an appropriate place and meaning in his poetic creations. This conscious inclusion of ancient forms of verse shows us that Whitman, although conceiving of himself as a new Adam born in a New Garden, the New World, was no “fool […] pretending that no poet or man of any kind ever existed before he was born upon the earth” (BLOOM, 1985, p.88). Considering this, there are two reasons for the use of parallelism in his poetry: its use in general as a poetic element which was carefully worked on; and parallelism for the purpose of enumeration, which takes us to the element just mentioned, the catalogues.

The first feature, also called parallel structure, makes speaking and writing easier to understand. Thus, “all items in a series” must be put “in the same grammatical form” (MAURER, 2000, p.252). This means that all verbs in a sentence must be in the same tense (e.g.: Last week she painted the bedroom, bought furniture and sold the car.), so that the same structure is repeated, and the same applies to any tenses or even nouns (e.g.: He bought a book, a CD, and a shirt.). This use of identical or similar syntactic constructions in clauses or phrases in the Leaves is not a pure transposition of rules of grammar into poetry. Actually, Whitman, when working on the poetic function of language, “uses parallelism not as a device of repetition but as an occasion for development” (WRIGHT, 1985, p.96). For his intention is to make the reader aware that he is not a grammarian working to perpetuate the rules of grammar, but a poet who knows what he is doing with the language, so he “lets his images grow, one out of another”. The poems then “show the free growth of metrical laws” and their uniformity and perfect form will “bud from them [the metrical laws] as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush” (1985, p. 91), freely but naturally, with forms and shapes in harmony with their significance, being the flowers and fruits a perfect produce of their tree. This way the poet depicts the modern world possessed of means that are appropriate to it.   We will soon provide an example of this process, when we quote the poem “Salut au Monde!”

Now we shall concentrate on the other feature of Leaves of Grass: the catalogues. There are two basic sources for the catalogues in Leaves of Grass: the Bible and Homer’s epics. They are present in books like Genesis, with the long genealogical descriptions of the ancient families, or the “Song of Solomon” (“Song of Songs”), where all the parts of the body of the bride are mentioned and compared to things (the poem “I Sing the Body Electric” is a catalogue of body parts). These books provided the source, the original idea for the catalogues, which Whitman adapted and recreated according to his own poetical purpose, to include the scenes and peoples from America in particular and from the world at large into his poetry. Whitman himself provides us with information on this subject, in his essay “The Bible As Poetry”, from November Boughs. In this essay, he gives an account of how he, the poet, his country, America, and humanity in general have a common root that links us to the past, especially a religious past, for there is a long line of ancestry dating back to ancient times:

Of its thousands, there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotions, successions of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of our own antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on which, phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably depends—our ancestry, our past. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1166)

And this ancestry is so important to our existence, so fundamental, that in his view not even America could exist today without it. Thus, the long catalogues, which have in times been criticized, are one of the cornerstones of the Leaves, as an honor to the value of the “Bible as a poetic entity”:

Strange, but true, that the principal factor in cohering the nations, eras and paradoxes of the globe, by giving them a common platform of two or three great ideas, a commonalty of origin, and projecting cosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope, all time—that the long trains, gestations, attempts and failures, resulting in the New World, and in modern solidarity and politics—are to be identified and resolv’d back into a collection of old poetic lore, which, more than any one thing else, has been the axis of civilization and history through thousands of years—and except for which this America of ours, with its polity and essentials, could not now be existing. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1166)

As our very existence is based on the acceptance of these “fountain heads of song” (1996, p.1167), he confirms his position by saying that “No true bard will ever contravene the Bible” (1996, p.1166). Here we have, revealed in his own words, how Whitman fused the “true bard” with the “true son of God”, the poet. For him, the role of a bard and that of a son of God are not separated, since they are one single entity working to spread the Word of the Lord on earth. The catalogues are one of the ways he found to create this type of ordering of the world in America, and then to formulate it into his songs, establishing the new era on a very solid and fundamental basis. Emerson, upon reading the gift copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass sent to him by the poet, quickly realized that “the solid sense of the book” was “a sober certainty”. Although he “rubbed” his “eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion”, he acknowledged that the book had “the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.637). These words from the Sage of Concord to Whitman, greeting him “at the beginning of a great career”, are part of the famous letter the former wrote the latter on 21 July, 1855. As Emerson was himself a minister[2], we might draw the conclusion that he saw nothing offensive to religion in Whitman’s book, including the use of catalogues. On the contrary, he was so delighted and reassured by the Leaves that he decided to visit New York to pay his respects to his “benefactor”. Since Whitman had admitted that Emerson was one of the greatest influences on him (ALLEN, 1955, p.242), certainly Emerson was very happy to recognize his teachings embodied in such a book. From this point of view, Emerson was necessarily the best judge for the Leaves. In fact, he and Thoreau were the only ones of such high stature to give a warm welcome to it.

The other source for the catalogues, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, contains some of them. The most famous one is the “Catalogue of the Ships”, a passage in Book 2 of the Iliad (2.494-759), which lists the contingents of the Achaean army that were on their way to attack Troy. The catalogue lists the names of the leaders, where each of them came from, sometimes giving an epithet (a descriptive phrase and a noun) to describe parentage and place, and also the number of ships used to transport the men to Troy. After that, there is a “Catalogue of the Trojans” and their allies (2.816-877). The “Argument” of Book II, on “The Trial of the Army, and The Catalogue of the Forces”, explains that this section of the epic “[…] gives occasion to the poet to enumerate all the forces of the Greeks and Trojans […]”[3]. Here we have the principal linguistic aspect of the catalogues: enumeration, which leads to grammatical parallelism. Book XVIII of the Iliad provides the “Catalogue of the Nereids”, a shorter version of the same catalogue that appears in Hesiod’s Theogony (the poem that describes the origins and genealogies of the gods of ancient Greece).  In Book XI of the Odyssey, there are two catalogues that are presented during the nekuia, Odysseus’ visit to the dead, or trip to the underworld: “The Catalogue of the Ladies”, when, after speaking to Tiresias, he speaks to a dozen women, who are related by blood to heroes or are favorites of gods; and “The Catalogue of the Condemned”[4], which lists the heroes that died in the Trojan War, and to whom he speaks.

The second topic mentioned above, the flow of images, blossoming and multiplying down the pages of the book, brings together the catalogues and the “free growth of metrical laws”. The first section of “Salut au Monde!” shows this growth of images, as an effect of what could be at first supposed to be just a plain use of mere repetitions:

O take my hand Walt Whitman!

Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!

Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next,

Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all.

What widens within you Walt Whitman?

What waves and soils exuding?

What climes? what persons and cities are here?

Who are the infants, some playing, some slumbering?

Who are the girls? who are the married women?

Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about each other’s necks?

What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?

What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists?

What myriads of dwellings are they fill’d with dwellers?

(WHITMAN, 1996, p.287)

When we look closely at the poem, we perceive that each verse has its own form, its own music, its own modulation that is the result of the poet’s inspiration, feelings, and thoughts conveyed in words in a poetic way. The alliterations, with capital letters to highlight the elements mentioned: “Such SightS and SoundS”, which makes us feel as if the “gliDINg WONDerS” were blowing in the wind; the combination of alliteration and assonance in “WhAt WIdens WIthin You WAlt WhItman”, with the chain of W’s plus the vowel sounds echoing forever as if to mark the spatial expansion inside the poet’s body and soul. Also, the use of traditional forms, in this case, a combination of a spondee (two stressed syllables) with two anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a long one); in the following line we have the same combination: this time, two spondees followed by two anapests: “What CLImes? WHAt PERsons and CIties are HEre?”. “What rivers are these?” (spondee and anapest); “What forests and fruits are these?” (a spondee, an anapest and an iamb). The iamb, the metrical foot of two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed, is the basis of the traditional iambic pentameter, the verse that comprises five iambs and is at the core of English poetry; some lines from the famous sonnet 18 by Shakespeare (1992, p.753) will do as an example: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate. / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, / And summer’s lease has all too short a date”, which is in the first lines: “O take my hand Walt Whitman”; “Such gliding wonders!”. Then a caesura, a pause or break near the middle of the line, and after that, another couple of iambs: “such sights and sounds”.

This example of verses takes us now to the third topic mentioned, which is meter, or versification. We know that we could supply more examples of the traditional poetic forms used in Leaves of Grass. However, we must make a stop here so that we can introduce the subject that we actually need to discuss: the fact that the poetic system in Portuguese is different from the English one in some respects, as we will see below. The reason for that is that our work here is on the re-creation of Whitman’s poetry into Portuguese, and a sole description of the English versification system will not help us much. In reality, what we need is to know how different or similar they are, so that we can perform our task more perfectly. At this point, we will only complete the information about the most common types of feet in English, in order to move to the next step, the Portuguese meter. So, in English, there is the trochee, which is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. It consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. William Blake[5] provides us an example with two lines of his famous poem “The Tyger”: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night”. The dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, such as English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, the opposite of the anapest (two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable). This form uses verses of six feet. There is usually a caesura after the ictus (beat, the strongest syllable) of the third foot.  Examples: the opening line of the Aeneid (Virgil) is a typical line of dactylic hexameter (here we have an example of quantitative Latin verse translated into accentual English verse): “I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy [...]” (“Árm? v?r?mqu? c?n?, // Tr?i? qu? prím?s ?b óris”). The first and second feet are dactyls. The third and fourth feet are spondees, with two long vowels, one on either side of the caesura. The fifth foot is a dactyl, with the ictus this time falling on a grammatically long vowel. The final foot is a spondee with two grammatically long vowels. The dactylic hexameter[6] was utilized in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (mentioned below in section 3.5) in his poem Evangeline, “which we are told to read as though [it was] written in the classical dactylic hexameter” (WRIGHT, 1985, p.90); Wright is saying that because he knows that Longfellow was a master of the “iambic patterns” with a “grasp of its permissive variations”; but, most importantly, apart from his masterful “grasp” of the techniques, in his opinion, Longfellow had “radical limits”, due to the fact that his mastery drove him away from the “living world”. It is like the designation of the poet in an ivory tower, detached from the physical, practical world, which is known to English, French, American and Brazilian people. The first line of the poem will serve as an example (capitals to indicate stress): “THIS is the / FORest prim- / EVal. The / MURmuring / PINES and the / HEMlocks,”.

When we look at these verses from the perspective of a Brazilian reader, whose cultural and poetic background is based on a different poetic system, we have a different interpretation. In Portuguese, verses have a syllabic base, whereas in English they have an accentual-syllabic one, which is based on its stressed and unstressed syllables and on the number of syllables of each foot and its variations. Poetry in languages like Latin and Greek use quantitative verse: long and short syllables, which means that it is based on duration, the length of time needed to pronounce each syllable. In Portuguese, the verses have a fixed number of poetic syllables per line, counted until the last stressed syllable of the line[7], with patterns of regular accents. Verses range from one to twelve syllables, thus defined: monosyllables, disyllables, trisyllables, tetrasyllables (or quadrisyllables), pentasyllables, hexasyllables, heptasyllables, octosyllables, eneasyllables, decasyllables (there is the blank or heroic decasyllable, which is not rhymed), hendecasyllables and dodecasyllables, or alexandrines. Longer verses, usually from ten poetic syllables on, have a caesura (a break) that divides the line in two parts called hemistiches, or half lines of verse (which can be marked by punctuation or just the pause between phrases).

The verses of five (with the accent on the fifth syllable and on some other for phonic support) and seven syllables (with varying accents on the second, third, fourth and fifth, and naturally on the seventh), in Portuguese, are called redondilhas (TREVISAN, 2001, p.172), which represent the most popular forms, traditionally (minor and major, according to the number of metrical syllables; the word comes from Spanish redondilla, a stanza form that consists of four lines, normally of eight syllables each, rhyming in abba; in Portuguese, we have a different way of counting the syllables from Spanish: all syllables are counted in verses in Spanish scansion, which is why they are heptasyllables in our vernacular). The “redondilha major” is the more popular of the two, for its rhythm finds easy expression within our language. We could say that poetry written in verses with an odd number of syllables is more lyric and those written in verses with an even number of poetic syllables are more recitative, more prosaic, although that is not something fixed.

In this manner, when a Brazilian reader, who has acquired some basic knowledge in Brazilian literature, reads the same verses by Whitman from “Salut au Monde!”, he will see the same elements through another aesthetic and linguistic filter, that of the “metrical laws” in Portuguese: “O take my hand Walt Whitman!” is a hexasyllable with accents on the second, fourth and sixth syllables; “Such gliding wonders!” and “such sights and sounds!”, an eneasyllable separated by a caesura after the fifth syllable or two tetrasyllables. “What widens within you Walt Whitman” is an octosyllable, and “What climes? What persons and cities are here?” is a perfect decasyllable, with main accents on the second, fourth and seventh syllables. Even though the approaches to the literary piece are diverse, the final impression on the reader is the same, for the poetic product is the same. Our fruition of poetry, despite being in another language, does not pose a problem. The reader does not need to know which feet are employed in the making of a poem or the patterns of accent or rhyme to have delight in it. The only thing that matters is whether the poem is effective or not, whether it conveys its meanings in an appropriate manner or not. Being ignorant of the metrical laws does not prevent readers from appreciating poetry. Fruition of aesthetic beauty does not rely on previous knowledge of techniques of composition. Otherwise, the common man would never enjoy beauty in any form or shape in which it is presented. Naturally, there is a problem when the specialist, who can be a poet or a critic, reads the piece of writing. In this case, the poet or translator must be aware of the fact that he must study this subject, when he undertakes such a task.

Therefore, the main question is: how to transfer the sounds, the prosody of one language into another? There is a problem imposed to us by the difference between the poetic systems, based on the prosody of each language. The rhythm of the English language is based on this correlation between stressed and unstressed syllables, and also on the duration of sounds. The question of rhythm is important because there are two important factors concerning pronunciation in English: English pronunciation is irregular; that is, stressed syllables vary even within word families (see: compare, comparison, but comparable); and the unstressed syllables are “shortened”, or reduced (GILBERT, 2001, pp.22-25) and have a “muffled” quality, so they are “unclear”. This is phonetically called “schwa”, “the most common vowel sound in English”, whose phonetic symbol is ?. As any teacher of English will know and Gilbert highlights it, only teachers “enunciate every sound clearly in order to help students understand” (2001, p.25) the language, making it difficult for the native speakers to understand people who speak English applying to it the concept of equal length of syllables (as is the case of Portuguese). A ten-year-experience of teaching English as a foreign language has showed us the difficulty students have with rhythm when learning English. On this topic, Gilbert, a researcher who works with EFL teachers, writes:

[…] syllables are an essential foundation for English rhythm. Rhythm may be the single most important element in learning clear pronunciation. There may also be consequences for grammar. […] students with an instinct for the rhythm of English seem to have better control of the structure words [articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs]. An awareness of syllables is important because it helps students: 1. identify the exact syllable for stress marking, which native speakers rely on for clear understanding […] 2. Notice reduced syllables […] 3. Become sensitive to English rhythm […] (GILBERT, 2001, p.1)

Apart from the focus on rhythm, Gilbert advises teachers to use the words “short” and “long” to describe the “duration contrasts” between words like “ship/sheep”, “pull/pool”, “bit/beat”, “sick/seek”, “live/leave” (minimal pairs) and so on, which will help students “produce authentic English rhythm”. But not only these kinds of pairs of sounds can be contrasted in this manner; other words with similar vowel sounds fall within the same category of short and long opposition, according to the sound that comes after the vowel: if the final sound is a “stop” sound like t, d or p, the vowel is short, and if the final sound is a “continuant” sound like y, s, n or l, the vowel sound is long: bite/buy, like/lies, mate/main, light/lie, keep/key, light/line, rope/role, boat/bone, food/fool, rude/rule (GILBERT, 1997, pp.25-7). Additionally, he counsels teachers to resort to poems and songs as an excellent aid to mastering English rhythm and sound.

On the other hand, in Portuguese, according to Bechara, a traditional grammarian, “[…] quantity [that is, duration] is little felt and has no noticeable role in the characterization and distinction of words and grammatical forms[8]” (1989, p.53). We only lengthen words for emphasis. The most important difference is that in our poetic language the “fundamental units of rhythm” are the syllables (TREVISAN, 2001, p.67). Poetically speaking, we may call them “sounds” to distinguish poetic syllables from grammatical syllables. This is useful because in poetry there are elements such as syneresis: the contraction of two vowels into a diphthong; and dieresis: in sound, it is a pause, but linguistically it is a mark placed over the second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that they must be pronounced separately, as in the word naïve. Thus, Trevisan defines a “basic principle” for poetry in Portuguese on syllables and their development around a “dynamic center” which is the “stressed syllable”: “The Portuguese verse has stress and the number of syllables as an obligation. They make up the rhythmic groupings […]” (TREVISAN, 2001, p.68) on which poetry lives, in reality, its material basis. Naturally, in our language we have intonation like any other language, which is necessary to express the speaker’s mind. Bechara asserts that “In Portuguese, […] the clauses are characterized by intonation, that is, the way they are uttered within a certain melodic cadence” (BECHARA, 1989, p.194). So the clauses are articulated in a way that the “end of a clause is always marked by one of the types of intonation” that exist in the language (1989, p.194). Normally, the words in our mother tongue have stressed syllables, and they are obviously important to correct pronunciation. In poetry, they are used to mark the accents in combination with the number of syllables of the meter being used. To make the verse sound as natural as possible, it is necessary to make the stressed syllable coincide with the poetic accent within the meter chosen.

Bilac and Passos[9] (1930, p.37), in their Tratado de Versificação (Versification Treatise), define verse, or rather “meter”, as “a grouping of words, or even only one word, with forced pauses and a certain number of syllables, which become music”. The two Parnassian poets, famous for their struggle for exactness of form and adherence to classical themes that resulted in detachment from their subjects, advised that “in Portuguese, more than in any other language, […] syllables and pauses are cultivated.” This poetic school preceded Modernism in Brazil. Although these poets were considered by modernists as antiquated, what they say about the poetic system of our language is true. So, to answer the question presented above, on how to transfer the prosody of one language into another, we may say that we are going to base our work on sounds and rhythm, and, like Whitman, allow his poetry to grow out of the metrical laws in Portuguese. We shall let it sink in within our soul, so that it will come up naturally in the Portuguese meter, mixing technique and intuition in the re-creation of Leaves of Grass into our vernacular. In the following section we will discuss modernism in Brazil and in some other countries, focusing our attention on the most important writers who are in some way connected to Whitman and the renewal of poetry in the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.

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[1] Oswald de Andrade, one of the most important modern writers in Brazil, and a leading figure in the 1922 Week of Modern Art, a turning point in Brazilian art and literature, was mentioned above for his two most famous novels. He was also an experimental poet, and wrote many books of inventive poetry, in which he excelled in the use of this technique. We will present more information on de Andrade in the next section.

[2] Emerson acquired a license to preach in 1826 after taking a course at Cambridge; although successful, he gave up his ministration in 1832, for not being at ease to celebrate Communion.

[3] This information is provided by Alexander Pope, in his translation of Homer’s Iliad, in the “Argument” of Book II. Available at: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/homer/h8ip/book2.html>.

Accessed on 19 December 2007.

[4] In the translation of Odorico Mendes, into Portuguese, “The Catalogue of the Nereids” appears on page 408 of the Iliad (HOMERO, 2005); the other catalogues appear in lines 169-495 of Book XI of the Odyssey (HOMERO, 1992).

[5] Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker, author of famous books such as Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Augusto de Campos paid him a tribute in a book called O Tygre, de William Blake. São Paulo: author’s edition, 1977.

[6] The Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is an example of dactylic tetrameter, also common in classical poetry: “PICture your SELF in a BOAT on a RIVer with / TANgerine TREE-ees and MARmalade SKII-ii-es.”

[7] This is what is stated by traditional scansion in Portuguese, that is, analysis of meter (BECHARA, 1989, p.353); (BILAC; PASSOS, 1930, p.48). Ali, in his book Versificação Portuguesa (Portuguese Versification), argues that counting the syllables only up to the last stressed one is “arbitrary” (2006, p.20), since most of the verses in Portuguese end in words that are paroxytone, that is, words which are stressed on the next to last syllable. Ali presents the more reasonable method of counting all the syllables in a verse line, which would make all verses that end in paroxytones change category; example: a monosyllable would become a disyllable, and so on. Actually, the only thing that changes is the classification of the verses. Nothing changes for the poet or the readers, for the sounds remain the same.

[8] Pound also made this distinction between languages, emphasizing its importance (1987, p.56): “The quantitative verse of the ancients was replaced by syllabic verse, as they say in the school books. […] And that fitting […] of words to tune replaced the supposedly regular spondees, dactyls, etc. The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by men with susceptible ears. I particularly want to keep off these technical details. The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it.”

[9] Olavo Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac (1865-1918) was the most acclaimed poet of the Parnassian school in Brazil, having won a contest for “Prince of Brazilian poets” in 1907. Sebastião Cícero Guimarães Passos, journalist and poet (1867-1909), was Bilac’s friend. Both were founding members of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), established on July 20^th, 1897, whose first and “perpetual” president is Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the most important Brazilian novelist, essayist and short-story writer, historically speaking, who was also a poet and dramatist.

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