A melancolia da criatividade na poesia de Augusto dos Anjos

Abstract

This book is the result, almost in its entirety, of my doctoral thesis, "The anguish of influence in the poetry of Augusto dos Anjos", defended in March 2001 at the Federal University of Paraíba under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Francisco Gomes Corrêa (Chico Viana), in which I sought to demonstrate the sublime already identified and recognized, but not yet adequately explained, in the critical fortune of the poet, which is most often considered by critics as "morbid" and "grotesque". The three sonnets discussed here, To a Masked Man, Soliloquy of a Visionary and Intimate Verses, were chosen as examples of this critical diagnosis, and through them we seek, using Harold Bloom's theory and methodology of creative anguish, to show how they, ironically and self-consciously, through the process that Bloom calls "dialectical revisionism", not only express, reflect and emanate the sublime, but also recreate it. Augusto dos Anjos is an Orphic poet and, in this sense, his poetry invites poetry lovers to the most fantastic and gratifying adventures in the realm of imagination and the sublime. It is our ambition to provide lovers of the poet with the necessary initiation to experience him, appreciate him and, finally, find him in the dimension that has always been his: that of the sublime. Before presenting the interpretations of the three poems, a discursive treatment of Bloom's theory is necessary - whose critical fortune, in Portuguese, practically does not exist - in order to situate the reader in the theoretical-critical context that supported this work. The book is divided into five chapters, the first and last being, respectively, Introduction and Final Considerations. The three sonnets will be studied verse by verse; the chapters were subdivided according to the verses or sequences of images in each verse, which require more or less discussion according to the importance they occupy in the interpretative "hierarchy".