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Matos Guerra Gregório de
(1636?—1696)

Gregório de Matos e Guerra was the major baroque poet of Brazil, cultivating religious, lyrical, satirical and erotic poetry that was collected privately and finally published in the nineteenth century. His satiric poetry criticized everyone and everything, earning him the nickname Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell).

He was born in Salvador, Bahia and is sometimes considered the first Brazilian poet. The poetic work of Gregório de Matos has intrigued most of the literature critics and historians, and raised contradictory comments and opinions. Plagiarized, imitated, versatile, translator, original poet, those are the most common qualifications destined to Gregório. He wrote during the XVII Century, when there was no press in Brazil yet, and his work just started being published no the second half of XIX Century. There are no autograph, nor handwritten from the very author. He was a popular artist and against ideology, his texts were copied and re-copied by many, making it even more difficult to solve the authorship problem.

Gregório de Matos was born in Bahia, where he studied at the Jesuit College. In 1650 he traveled to Lisbon and in 1652 entered the University of Coimbra, where he completed his jurisprudence degree in 1661. There he married D. Michaella de Andrade and two years later was named a judge in Alcácer do Sal, in the province of Alentejo, Portugal and in 1672 he served as solicitor for the city of Bahia to the Portuguese court.

In 1679 he returned to Brazil as a widower. He married for the second time in 1691 to Maria dos Povos. But Gregório led a rather Bohemian life. A malcontent, he criticized everyone and everything: the Church, government, and all classes of people, from the rich and powerful to the lowly pauper, sparing no race or profession in between. This constant satirizing earned for him the nickname of Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell).

His irreverent and satiric writings eventually got him into trouble, and Gregório was exiled to Angola in 1694. Very ill, he managed to return to Brazil the following year, but he was prohibited from entering Bahia and from distributing his poetry. He instead went to Recife, where he died in 1696.

There is no record of his death, no painting of him, no proved signature, and no text published during his lifetime. All poems conferred to Gregório are handwritten books (called codex), making an amount of twenty four. All of them are from the 18th century and were copied by different people. Most of them may be found on the National Library in Rio de Janeiro.

Initially, his lyric and religious poetry drew critical attention. Even today his satiric poetry is highly valued for its linguistic and sociological value.

Not published until the nineteenth century, his baroque verse has been collected from private albums and manuscripts and divided into four major classifications: religious, lyrical, satirical, and erotic, thus conforming to the tension found in baroque duality.

Brazil, 1986, Titul page of Grigorio de Matos book