The drama of the bourgeois individual who yearns to change society is poignantly portrayed in “Elegy 1938,” with the elegist accusing himself of indolence, pride, and impatience. The poem is much more than self-criticism, however. It points a finger at the political “heroes” who rouse up the crowds in city parks and then retreat to their books and ideologies. And while the “Great Machine” that exasperates the narrator obviously refers to the political and economic system, it also includes nature itself, represented by the “inscrutable” palm trees lining the wide avenues of Rio de Janeiro. Incapable of wishful or facile thinking, Drummond viewed human society in relation to human nature, and human nature as part of the natural order. Change was not going to be easy. In the poem’s final stanza, a catalogue of ills plaguing Brazil and the rest of the world in 1938 includes not only the war, unemployment, and unfair distribution of wealth but also the rain. Drummond was not being facetious. He was admitting — or he at least suspected — that economic injustice and armed conflict among humans were as inevitable as the weather.
Feeling of the World had a print run of only 150 copies. It was not until 1942 that Drummond’s poetry became available in a commercial edition with decent distribution, entitled Poesias. The volume brought together his first three collections and included a fourth one: José. Acclaimed by critics since he first began publishing, the poet now won an enthusiastic following among readers at large. Carlos Drummond de Andrade became a public figure. And so the Brazilian Communist Party was delighted when, in May 1945, he agreed to be a coeditor of its official newspaper, the Tribuna Popular. He lasted in the post for only a few months. There was little room for diversity of opinion, and the poet was unwilling to censor himself. When the party leadership suppressed the last line of one of his articles for the newspaper, he was furious, and by November he parted ways with both the paper and the party.
By an irony of timing, it was the very next month, December 1945, that his publisher brought out the collection Rose of the People, hailed by a reviewer as “the only revolutionary work … by a Communist author in Brazil.” It included a handful of poems that could indeed be labeled revolutionary, and “Letter to Stalingrad,” besides praising the city for resisting the Nazi invaders, smiled with hopeful approval on the “new world” being built by the Soviet regime. Perhaps this poem (not included in this volume), while a great paean to a besieged citizenry, is a tad wishful and facile — an exception to the rule of organic, psychological, and ideological complexity that distinguishes Drummond’s political poetry. Take “Death of the Milkman,” in which a nameless member of the proletariat is the victim of a system that values the preservation of property over human life. Reading the poem closely, we find that the likewise nameless property owner who shot the milkman is himself a victim, a circumstance highlighted by the fact that the lethal gun “jumped into his hand.” The almost passive agent of the crime courts pity from his neighbors by reminding them that he has family, namely a father, who perhaps depends on him for sustenance. The poor, uneducated milkman, meanwhile, is not only a casualty of the capitalist obsession to protect property at all costs; he is also a prey of the poet-narrator’s “impulse / of human empathy,” which he cannot grasp and which is of no practical benefit to him. It benefits only the poet — who takes advantage of the milkman’s death to write a heartfelt poem — and the poet’s readers, who are deeply moved by the story. Everyone is implicated.
The various thematic threads of “Death of the Milkman”—class conflicts, family relationships, the poet’s relationship to the world and to his poetic art — recur elsewhere in Rose of the People, which also includes profound reflections on love, on aging, and on dying. If Drummond has a magnum opus, it is this book, in which he sometimes seems to leave poetry behind, as if his words were a direct transcription of life itself. In “The Last Days,” his greatest testament and hymn to living, the poet courageously leaves himself behind, knowing that life should and will continue without him. The beauty of Drummond’s autobiographical poems is that the personal life they describe, interrogate, and memorialize is unessential. It is a specimen, a concrete instance — a naked model for the work of art.
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Drummond’s poetry entered new territory with the publication of Clear Enigma (1951), whose epigraph, “Les évènements m’ennuient” (Paul Valéry), was a tip-off that something had changed. It was mainly political events that bored the poet, disillusioned by his brief incursion into party politics several years earlier. Other kinds of events — dealing with affections, the family, and the inexorable passage of time — continued to serve as thematic material. His poems, after all, had to be about something. What was most obviously different about Clear Enigma was the presence of traditional poetic forms. The modernist poet who had rarely before used fixed meters, let alone rhyme, now availed himself of both devices. While many of the poems in the collection still relied on the free-verse style Drummond had been cultivating for over twenty years, others resorted to a rhyme scheme, and there are a number of sonnets. “The Table,” definable as a personal family epic, forgoes rhyme but employs seven metrical syllables* in every one of its 340 lines. (My translations of this and other poems attend to rhythm without counting syllables.) And “The Machine of the World,” likewise unrhymed, maintains a strict decasyllabic line and looks at first glance as if it were written in terza rima, that marvelous form invented by Dante Alighieri. The first stanza, in fact, evokes Dante at the start of his journey in the Inferno but with the scene transposed to a road in Minas Gerais. The rest of the poem, with its classical diction and dense syntax, is reminiscent of Luís de Camões. The “machine of the world” is a conceit borrowed directly from the great Portuguese Renaissance poet who used it in a lyric poem and in his epic The Lusiads.
A semiclassical style continues to weave through subsequent collections, even if free verse was and would always remain Drummond’s dominant style. Sometimes he combined the two. “Elegy,” published in 1954, is another poem whose language and tone are strongly reminiscent of Camões (in his canções, or canzoni), although it does not rhyme or observe any metrical pattern. Drummond’s late-blooming interest in classical forms and registers coincided with an increased attention to metaphysics. Ever since “In the Middle of the Road,” with its obsessive focus on a single stone lying in the road, he was fond of taking up ontological and metaphysical issues, but now they loomed larger and were more likely to be addressed head-on. The modernist cause had been won, while age-old questions of philosophy and theology still begged for answers.