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Drummond de Andrade Carlos
(1902—1987)

Carlos Drummond de Andrade was perhaps the most influential Brazilian poet of the 20th century. He has become something of a national poet; his poem "Canção Amiga" ("Friendly Song") was printed on the 50-cruzados note.

Drummond was born in Itabira, a rural village in Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. His parents were farmers who owned their own land of partial Hungarian and Portuguese ancestry [1]. He went to a school of pharmacy in Belo Horizonte and became a pharmacist. He worked in government service for most of his life, eventually becoming director of history for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service of Brazil.

Though his earliest poems are formal and satirical, Drummond quickly adopted the new forms of Brazilian modernism that were evolving in the 1920s, incited by the work of Mário de Andrade (to whom he was not related). He adopted a whitmanian free verse, mingling a speech fluent in elegance and truth about the surrounding, many times quotidian, world, with a fluidity of thought. It is as if Wordsworth was endowed with more modern, contorted and surrealistic devices and fancy.

The work of Carlos Drummond is generally divided into several segments, which appear very markedly in each of his books. But this is somewhat misleading, since even in the midst of his everyday poems or his socialist, politicized poems, there appear creations which can be easily incorporated into his later metaphysical canon, and none of these styles is completely free of the others. There's surely much metaphysical content in even his most rancid political poems.

The most prominent of these later metaphysical poems is A Máquina do Mundo (The Machine of the World). The poem deals with an anti-Faust referred in the first person, who receives the visit of the aforementioned Machine, which stands for all possible knowledge, and the sum of the answers for all the questions which afflict men; in highly dramatic and baroque versification the poem develops only for the anonymous subject to decline the offer of endless knowledge and proceed his gloomy path in the solitary road. It takes the renaissance alegory of the Machine of the World from Portugal's most esteemed poet, Luís de Camões, more precisely, from a canto at the end of his epic masterpiece Os Lusíadas. There are also hints from Dante and the form is adapted from T .S. Eliot's dantesque passage in "Little Gidding." It is considered by some to be one of the peaks of lyric poetry in the 20th Century, and has been voted by a distinct corpus of critics as the greatest Brazilian poem of all times.

Brazil, 1995, Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Brazil, 2002, Drummond de Andrade

Nicaragua, 1995, Carlos Drummond de Andrade