CLÁSSICOS BRASILEIROS BRAZILIAN CLASSICS - Imprensa Oficial

Brazilian Classics
A selection of authors with works in public domain
44
CRUZ E SOUSA
(1861 – 1898)
Black poet, Black Dante, Black Swan... not a
few epithets have been assigned to this poet
died in 1898, who has already been compared
to Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Stefan George,
and Lautréamont, among other writers of
international importance. At the time when
naturalism and the Parnassianism gave direction
to the literary canon in the country, the
publication of Broquéis started the Symbolist
movement in Brazil. Cruz e Sousa (a son of
emancipated slaves who, in spite of that, received
an aristocratic education and openly supported
the abolitionist cause) gave it an entirely singular
characteristic. If Cruz e Souza's originality derives
from his creative skills and dedication, it is also
true that life tragedies had no less importance for
the formulation of a poetry that was at one time
meditated and neuralgic, or else, as it has already
been said of it, wild. Through him, by means of a
logical imagination detachment and a significant
multiplicity of the language, the subjectivity
opens up, painfully, to an enigmatic cosmic and
ontological violence.
Review
Main works
Excerpt
Walled in
Which undergrounds had I already come from,
which appalling roads, tottering with exhaustion,
the legs shaking under the fatigue of one century,
repressing in the tremendous ond majestic Hells
of Pride the lacerated heart, always hearing
everywhere the clamor from the vain and idle
mouths: Wait! Wait! Wait!
Which highways have I walked by, stiff monk
of disillusions, knowledgeable of ices and the
foundations of Pain; of this strange, formidable,
terrible Pain, which sings and moums Requiems
in the woods, in the seas, in the winds, in the
storms; lonelily and gloomily hearing: Wait!
Wait! Wait!
That is why this suggestive hour meant then to
me the hour of Hope, which evoked whatever I
had dreamed of and faded away and wondered
and dived into the Void...
A singular clairvoyance
Cruz and Sousa was the Brazilian stylization or reaction in lace of an eminently French Symbolism. In the dialectical
process of the great black poet's work, one finds the more typically Brazilian note of a movement that used to be French.
The condition of being ethnically marginalized, 'walled in', worsened by his physical weaknesses, provided him with a
weltanschauung in such a peculiar way as to place him conveniently far from his French fellow poets. Even from those who,
like Baudelaire, had an influence on him.
(Eduardo Portella, "Aventura e desengano da periodização literária")
Measuring the impossible
"Through the eyes of the symbol, the visionary poet penetrates the invisible and tries to name that which is unspeakable;
however, in so doing, he starts measuring the impossible that, ever since the symbolism, besets all great poetry. Both
the white forms and the night of Cruz e Sousa hazard filling out this same emptiness, the unspeakable of the symbolic
experience, the hollow of the eye, sometimes only silence."
(Davi Arrigucci Jr., "A noite de Cruz e Sousa")
Tropos e fantasias (1885); Broquéis (1893); Missal (1893); Evocações (1898); Faróis (1900); Últimos sonetos (1905); Obras
(1943); Sonetos da noite (1958); Obra completa (1961).