Minas Gerais no poeta “de sete faces”

Abstract

The purpose of the current work is to reflect upon the presence of Minas Gerais in the work of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a Brazilian modernist poet. We consider that Drummond’s poetic production should be comprehended under two different points of view, though necessarily complementary to each other. From one perspective, the poet’s performance is viewed as one who aggregates the modernist movement of Minas Gerais, since he has dia‐ logued with other regional or even international expressions of this esthetic movement. From another perspective, one may notice the explicit reminiscent content of this production deeply embedded in a quite particular approach of topics related to poetry. Thereby, great part of re‐ searchers considers memory as an element explored both systematically and in different forms by the poet throughout his work. It is widely known that the poet would not need to refer to Minas or Itabira in order to express a “mineira” poetics. Machado de Assis, in his remark‐ able essay “Instinto de nacionalidade”, explains that the theme can only be justified as subject of poetry by the fact that it may proportion the conditions of beauty to the reader. And that is what Drummond does, eliding subject and object, interior and exterior: he goes further than a reminiscent referential, becoming also matter of reflection on the act of making poetry itself.