3.5 Part 1
3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre
In this section we will address the subject of renewing the craft of poetry through the invention of free verse, and how some poets and writers relate to Whitman. From our standpoint, Oswald de Andrade, already mentioned in the previous section, is the writer who most closely resembles Whitman in Brazil, given his artistic, social and political attitudes. We will also refer to Fernando Pessoas’s literary relationship with Whitman, as well as Gilberto Freyre’s, who was an admirer of the American bard. We mention these authors in our thesis because they have helped us understand Whitman and his poetry better. We will try to contextualize them and their works properly.
Speaking of re-creating the poet’s basic tool, the language, we have to mention Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade and the poets that took part in the Week of Modern Art in 1922 in São Paulo. They started their movement in opposition to the Parnassian school of poetry, which they called “office poetry”, because they thought that it was detached from the real life of the Brazilian people and from our natural environment. The modernist poets, especially Oswald and Mário de Andrade, conceived of our country as originally a land of happy and free people, Indians, subjugated by invaders, who, in a process of ritual cannibalism, would metaphorically devour the foreign culture and assimilate it into our own, creating thus a new form of art and culture, liberated from their moulds and pre-fabricated forms. In this sense, we might view the modernist poets not only as artists who promoted a linguistic revitalization of our language, but also as poets who, through this process, made modern artists from other countries better understood here.
One of the key elements in modernist poetics was the invention of free verse, which released poets from “traditional metrical laws” and stanzaic forms. Poets were then free to mix and vary these traditional forms according to their poetical skills, and also according to the themes and tones used in their writing. Their relation to Whitman is by the fact that he is viewed as one of the inventors of free-verse, together with Arthur Rimbaud[1]. Trevisan[2], a Brazilian philosopher, poet, essayist, and translator, makes this statement in his book A Poesia, Uma Iniciação à Leitura Poética (Poetry, An Initiation Into Poetic Readership, 2001, p.207). He writes that Whitman’s 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass was characterized by the “novelty” of verses without a fixed number of syllables and the use of anaphora, as in: “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore; / Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly: / Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, from section 11 of “Song of Myself” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.197). Trevisan also reminds us that anaphoras are a usual figure in biblical verses, besides parallelism and enumerations (p. 209), which agrees with our argument in the previous section on this aspect of Whitman’s poetry. Another example of poem that presents anaphoras is “To a Common Prostitute”, from “Autumn Rivulets”:
