In his last interview, given just weeks before his death in 1987, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (droo-MOHND djee ahn-DRAH-djee) said that his long and prolific career of poetry was not motivated by literary ambition but by “the need to express sensations and emotions that troubled my spirit and caused me anguish.” Poetry, he explained, had served him as an “analyst’s couch.” It is hard to take seriously his denial of literary ambition, since as a young man his goal in life was clearly to write the finest poetry he could write. Once he became established as Brazil’s greatest living poet (his only competitor for the title was João Cabral de Melo Neto, 1920–1999), he could relax, and the decreased poetic tension of his later work shows that he did relax. But what about the notion of poetry as self-expression and psychological self-analysis? It is a notion not necessarily in conflict with the idea of poetry as an artistic pursuit. For a man like Drummond, naturally taciturn, art was perhaps the ideal medium for exploring and expressing his feelings. Those feelings were not simply expressed, however; they were transformed. There was a metamorphic relationship between his life and his art.
The abundance of autobiographical information in the work of Carlos Drummond is apparently at odds with four of his recommendations to would-be poets contained in a poem appropriately titled “In Search of Poetry”:
1. “Don’t write poems about what happened.”
2. “Don’t tell me your feelings,” because “[w]hat you think and feel is not yet poetry.”
3. “Don’t reconstruct / your gloomy, long-buried childhood.”
4. “Don’t shift back and forth between / the mirror and your fading memory.”
After these and some other caveats, Drummond’s poem goes on to stress that poetry is made of words, and only through quiet listening can the poet coax the right ones into the right places. But words, of course, are not just sounds and graphic figures. They stand for things, and this is especially true in the content-rich poetry of Drummond, full of references to events, feelings, and childhood memories — precisely the kinds of content his “In Search of Poetry” rejects. We could try to resolve the discrepancy between his theory and practice by arguing that Drummond treated his own life like so much clay, handling it with objective detachment. Reading his work, we find that there is indeed artistic detachment, but also an unabashedly subjective narrator who is often bursting with pathos.
In another, very different poem about his poetic method, Drummond seems to make room for personal history, feelings, and memories. He describes building an elephant — a metaphor for the poem — from his “scant resources,” beginning with “some wood / from old furniture / to prop him up” (“The Elephant”). The old furniture presumably includes the poet’s experiences, his life story placed at the service of poetry. But this “service” is not self-effacing, as if autobiography were an indifferent raw material. On the contrary: the self matters immensely. In “The Elephant” and in Drummond’s poetry generally, the self is discreetly but sprawlingly everything and everyone. The poet’s relationship to himself, to his family, to the supernatural, to his poetry, to the world at large, and to his readers is all of a piece — all the same relationship. Autobiography becomes omnibiography. That is what makes his work uniquely compelling.
The vast and multifaceted nature of Drummond’s poetic “I” is announced in the poem that opens his first book — the “Seven-sided Poem.” In the sixth of its seven stanzas the narrator makes the spectacular claim that however large the world may be, “my heart’s even larger.” On the other hand, the first stanza has a “twisted” angel warning him at birth that he would be a “misfit” in life. His awkwardness is both social and spiritual, since he has difficulty getting on with other people and feels abandoned by God, whose absence he directly addresses in the fifth stanza. Elsewhere in the poem he explains how life overwhelms him. He is troubled by the urgency of the sexual impulse, baffled by the human diversity all around him, embarrassed by the sentimentality that spontaneously wells up in him, and he knows that poetry — his refuge — is not an adequate solution. Perhaps it is his overly large and sensitive heart that condemns him to be forever out of step with the world. Identified as “Carlos” in the third line, the poem’s first-person narrator perfectly resembles Carlos Drummond de Andrade, but he is also a kind of everyman, as suggested by the poem’s middle stanza, where he is referred to in the third person as “the man behind the glasses and mustache.”
“Childhood,” the second poem from Drummond’s first book, recalls how he spent many an afternoon reading one of his favorite adventure stories, Robinson Crusoe, in the shade of the mango trees while his mother sewed, his baby brother slept, the maid brewed coffee, and his father rode over the fields on horseback. Looking back, the narrator realizes that his story “was more beautiful than Robinson Crusoe’s.” It is not the past, not memory per se, that the poet exalts, but experience. Books are secondary. Life itself is a sufficient resource for making poems.
The second stanza of “Childhood” is illustrative of Drummond’s poetic technique in his early work:
In the white light of noon, a voice that learned lullabies
in shanties from the slave days and never forgot them
called us for coffee.
Coffee as black as the old black maid,
pungent coffee,
good coffee.
Words are used like paint to vividly evoke a scene, presenting a sharp contrast between light and dark, but the poem does not appeal only to our sense of sight. We can smell and taste the coffee, and we can hear those lullabies — perhaps sung by the maid while doing her chores, and most certainly when the narrator was still a baby and she rocked him to sleep. Drummond, a kind of literary Cubist, apposed and intersected temporal as well as spatial planes. “Childhood” shifts between the present time of remembrance, the time the poet was a boy with a baby brother, the time he himself was a baby, and the time before he was born, when the maid was a small child and learned songs that would later be woven into the narrator’s childhood. The maid’s past as a young slave — a growing-up story that contrasts with the narrator’s own — is as important to the poem (and to the life it describes) as the story of Robinson Crusoe mentioned in other stanzas. The stories are interconnected, and the poem is about the experience of childhood in general, not only about Drummond’s. It all makes for a deceptively simple, concise, and yet wide-open narrative.
In another early poem, “Multitudinous Heart,” the poet feels desperately out of place in downtown Rio de Janeiro, so different from the landlocked state of Minas Gerais where he grew up and was still living. Lonely and depressed amid the flashing lights, the young traveler vaguely contemplates suicide but is suddenly gripped by the excitement of the coastal city, then the nation’s capital. He feels the ocean waves pounding in his own chest, and the poem ends with these short and simple, yet enormous, lines: “the city is me / the city is me / I am the city / my love.” Once more the poetic I expands far beyond the bounds of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. The narrator, the teeming city and “my love”—which can mean both the love he has to give and the object of that love — are juxtaposed like infinitely reflecting mirrors, making the moment of epiphany reverberate in a crescendo. Drummond was a master poet of the ordinary sublime.
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A product of the Brazilian rural elite, Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born on October 31, 1902, the fifth of six children to reach adulthood (eight others died in infancy). His mother gave him the Drummond name, passed down from Scottish ancestors. His father owned and operated four ranches, but the town where they lived — Itabira — was known as the iron capital of Minas Gerais. When Drummond reports, in his “Confessions of a Man from Itabira,” that the sidewalks of his hometown were “ninety percent iron,” he was not exaggerating by much. And when he revisits the town as an adult and notes that “[t]he mountain was taller back then” (in “Journey Through the Family”), he means it literally: the iron-rich Cauê Peak had been decapitated and transformed into a mining pit. It was minerals — gold and diamonds — that first attracted settlers to Minas Gerais. Then came cattle ranchers and coffee growers. The people from Minas have always been known for being reserved, cautious, proud, and fiercely independent. Carlos Drummond fit the stereotype.
Generations of Andrade landowners had depended on slave labor, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, and former slaves worked as domestics in the large house where Drummond grew up. Their different way of speaking, their African religiosity (mixed up with Catholicism), their abundant use of medals and necklaces, the wealth of stories they had to tell, their songs — all of this represented an alternate, somewhat magical world for the future poet. There was a period in his childhood when Carlos was a regular visitor to the home of Alfredo Duval, a slave-descended mulatto who had gained local renown as an inventive, artistically sophisticated sculptor of saints. Duval also espoused anarchist political and social views.
Carlos’s father was a tough-minded, domineering patriarch, but he was a friend of progress, fond of new things, and he indulged his children. When he was ten or eleven years old, Carlos easily talked him into buying the Portuguese version of the International Library of Famous Literature, in twenty-four volumes — which he later wrote about in “Green Library.” Based on the original English-language edition, published in 1898, the Library included an assortment of greatest hits from the canon of Western literature, beginning with Homer, as well as many selections from nineteenth-century British and American authors now more or less forgotten. This hodgepodge of poetry, essays, fiction, and theater became the literary foundation for the little boy from Itabira. Drummond’s subsequent readings, as an adolescent and then an adult, would continue to be a mixed bag of irreproachable classics and recent literature of uneven quality. He did not worry about gaps in his knowledge of general culture, and he was far less informed about poetry than a Pound, an Eliot, or a Fernando Pessoa. That did not stop his rich literary imagination from being as productive as theirs.
Shy and studious but firm in his convictions and unwilling to back down, Drummond was expelled from a Jesuit boarding school for “mental insubordination.” That was in 1919. The next year he moved with his family to Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. It was there that he began to have a literary life, meeting with other young writers in cafés. He had already been a contributor to student publications; now he placed articles in local newspapers. It was an effervescent period for art and literature. The Modern Art Week of São Paulo, held in February 1922, gave visibility and momentum to Brazilian Modernism, which adapted the tenets of European vanguard movements such as Futurism and Dadaism to a nationalist project that promoted native culture and linguistic independence from Portugal. The fervor spread to other urban centers, and in 1924 an informal delegation of modernists traveled from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte. It included the painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), and the two prime movers of literary Modernism in Brazil: Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) and Mário de Andrade (1893–1945).
It is an odd coincidence: none of the three Andrades were related, but they form a trinity without which the history of twentieth-century Brazilian poetry would be much poorer. Oswald was the great iconoclast and fiery preacher of Modernism. Mário was a more careful and constructive theorist and creator. Carlos was the most inspired practitioner, applying lessons learned from the two older Andrades to produce his country’s most dazzling body of poetry to date.
Drummond had praised Oswald de Andrade’s first novel in a review for a Belo Horizonte newspaper published in late 1922, and it was Oswald who, a year and a half later, made sure the young writer and journalist knew that the modernists were coming to town. In 1928 Oswald would publish “In the Middle of the Road”—the poem that made Drummond both famous and infamous — on the front page of his Revista de Antropofagia. (Most of the ten-line poem is built on permutations of a single phrase: “In the middle of the road there was a stone.”) Anthropophagy, or cannibalism, as promulgated in the magazine, signified the violent assimilation and thorough Brazilianization of European cultural models, and it also honored Brazil’s indigenous past, when ritual cannibalism was still practiced. The native Tupi people did not have a written language until the Jesuits arrived, and Drummond soon came to feel that Oswald’s anthropophagy, when applied to poetry, had too much anthropology. This led to a falling-out between the two writers.
Mário de Andrade was Drummond’s most vital and enduring mentor. They began exchanging letters in 1924, right after their first meeting, and Mário was a brilliant literary coach. He generously read the younger poet’s work, giving him detailed commentary and urging him, above all, to write Portuguese the way Brazilians actually spoke it. Mário, who had studied music, was particularly attentive to sound and rhythm, and since he understood exactly what Carlos was trying to achieve, he knew just what to encourage, what to warn against.
In 1925 Drummond, who already stood out as one of the leading modernists from Minas Gerais, founded a short-lived magazine with his friends from Belo Horizonte, and in 1930 he self-published his first book of poems, which was widely admired, even if his dry, minimalist style was not to everyone’s liking. Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968), the senior poet among the Brazilian modernists, lavished praise on the poetry. So did Mário de Andrade. Drummond’s poetic career was launched, but he still needed to earn a living. He had a wife to support, Dolores, and since 1928 a daughter, Maria Julieta (the couple had lost a newborn son one year earlier). Averse to working as a pharmacist, the profession for which he earned a degree in 1925, the same year he married, the poet did some teaching and pursued journalism until he finally secured a job as a civil servant for the state of Minas Gerais, in 1929. Five years later he moved with his wife and daughter to Rio de Janeiro, where he would work for the federal government until his retirement, in 1962. It was in that city that he died, on August 17, 1987, twelve days after his daughter’s death from cancer. His wife, born in 1899, died in 1994. There are three surviving grandsons.