Um lírico na periferia do capitalismo: modernismo e modernização na “comunidade imaginada” brasileira a partir da obra poética e em três epistolários de Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relation between the aesthetic modernity in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poetry, emphasizing the 1930s and 1940s, considering the modernization of Brazilian society in that same period. Using Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined community, we analyzed Drummond’s contribution to the formation of Brazilian society in the light of aesthetic modernity and the modernization at capitalism’s periphery. For this purpose, we took a methodological approach which used two material supports in two distinct fronts of performance. The first one is in the public sphere, where we undertook the scrutinizing of the poet’s first five books – Alguma poesia (1930), Brejo das almas (1934), Sentimento do mundo (1940), José (1942) and A rosa do povo (1945) –, whose objective was the analysis, in the area of the sociology of culture and art, of the modifications and games in aesthetic modernity on the interface with the dynamics of writers and intellectuals at the first Vargas Era. The second support, thistime in the private sphere, were direct in the research of three epistolaries respective authors contributed for the understanding of the dynamics and internal conflicts that led to the imagined modern Brazilian community. Among the letter writers who exchanged mail with Drummond, in chronological order, here in this thesis, we have Mário de Andrade with his performative verve and his crossroads in modern aesthetics; Alceu Amoroso Lima and the political climate of the chimerical Catholicism in the routine of the public servant and poet Drummond; and finally Cyro dos Anjos, the melancholic amanuensis, who in the daily asshole revealed to us the circumstances and the anguishes of the intellectual / writer on the periphery of capitalism.