Arquivo de literature | Page 97 of 111

Composing Free Verses Is a Great Way to Escape the Comparison

Composing free verses is a great way to escape the comparison. In free verse, a poem automatically repels the “aesthetic garbage” classification: it obeys particular criteria. It exchanges “bad” for “different”. And the critics find themselves in trouble when evaluating it, running the risk of confusing the bad with an “I did not like it”. To the artist, it is the right path to victory, since if dares a sonnet, risks direct comparison with Shakespeare. How many submit to the challenge? Easier to invent a new aesthetic…

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The Absence of a More Noble Conception

I think of the major of 20th-century literature. The human being is a multifaceted, ambiguous animal, subject to diverse and contradictory manifestations. In him, the savage mixes with the sublime in a variable—and generally unbalanced—proportions. An author, therefore, is not wrong when he portrays him as a slave of desire, a puppet of the will. And he gets it right when he explores irrationality and immorality. However, a pause. There is in man the manifestation of the beautiful, and amputated is the work that fails to explore it. To give life to the most archaic and animalistic human specimen is a task, let us say, less difficult than to dare to penetrate the mind of the model that rises above the banal. Therefore, the author will be smaller if he escapes from the task of conceiving the rare. Where is the noble? Non-existent? That is what seems to say the literature that is incapable of generating it even though, like Swift, in the form of horses…

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The Explosion of an Unbearable Inner Conflict

As opposed to the representation of external phenomena, I perceive great art as the explosion of an unbearable inner conflict. That is to say: the artist prints what torments him or the object of his insatiable desire. Psychological obsessions, feelings that attack him violently… the great art is the consequence of an inner war. Exactly because of that, it rarely presents itself as pleasant. Intensity has nothing to do with peace…

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A Thousand Times Sorry

I am sorry, thousand times sorry, but I find it hard to accept… Almost all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets on the same theme, almost all of Camões’ lyrical poetry chanting the same lament… How is that possible? I say and think myself a barbarian, amputee of my human dimension. But I cannot swallow it. Patience… I cannot and there is nothing to do. Here is the truth: there is a kind of suffering that’s never taken a single breath away from me, it does not arouse my compassion and sometimes it makes me laugh. O indolence! O cruelty!… I will end very, very badly with you…

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