The modern poet, adept at the fashionable practices of exterminating punctuation, altering the spelling, ignoring capital letters, drawing with letters, repeating words exhaustively, etc., etc., has to concentrate very hard not to pass for a child or, in more serious cases, for a mental retard. How just a few pages are enough to make one sick of such gimmicks! Then we are left to wonder: what else? Often, we have to conclude that they are nothing more than disguises for an inability to work words in a dynamic and interesting way, showing mastery and making creative use of the resources offered by the language. We end up reflecting on what the Latinists repeat so often, and it seems that intelligence is related to the ability to articulate language…
Category: Notes
The Evolution of Manuel Bandeira’s Poetry
The evolution of Manuel Bandeira’s poetry describes, much more than an aesthetic rebellion, a search for authenticity, a progressive stripping away of adornment in order to focus on the fundamental. It is a poetry that sought more to rid itself of artificialities than to invent new ones; a poetry that is intimate, personal, and sincere, original more for the expression of an individuality than for the form—the form, which Bandeira himself expressly called secondary and which seems, to some, to constitute the essence of his poetic creation. That is why Bandeira is not imitated: to do so, one would have to be him; an honor that fortunately will not be bestowed on anyone.
Academic Analysis of Poems
There seems to be something wrong, counterproductive and absurd in these academic analyses of poems, which dissect the verses to the point of highlighting the expressive effect of each of the letters that make up its words. The contradiction is obvious when we see the result: endless paragraphs that seem to hide the essence of the verses rather than elucidate it. It is curious: these academics see alliteration, assonance before the very meaning of the words they read. There is no denying that such expressive resources sometimes reinforce an idea; but that is what they do: reinforce, and are merely auxiliary. It is even ridiculous to want to see the analyst as having expressive intent in sibilants when the author has limited himself to using plural words, not to mention worse examples. What is this? Finally, we are left with the feeling that there is an attempt to idealize the futile to the detriment of the essential.
Going Back to the Past
It is a very amusing irony the fruitful tendency of the “new sciences” to turn to the past in search of foundations and answers. We see, for example, psychology, which has become another after Jung, much more complex, interesting and effective, thanks to the deep investigations that Jung made in various terrains of various ancient cultures. And this phenomenon is not limited to the “new sciences,” being present in literature, philosophy and wherever we turn our lenses: the answers that man needs seem to be present in the most primitive traces of his existence, the expansion of his knowledge being limited to giving new forms to conclusions—not to say truths—already perceived long ago.