We cannot talk about Manuel Bandeira without first recalling what Brazilian Modernism was. This literary period erupted with the Industrial Revolution (20th century), as it was the result of a great revolution: the Revolution of 30, where Getúlio Vargas rises to power and the industrial bourgeoisie defines a new direction for the country's economy, which was the industrialization.
With this, art and culture were also influenced, making their followers open paths to new social transformations and fight for a genuinely national literature, based on the absolute freedom of creation.
The authors who were part of the modernist era aimed to rescue cultural origins, which until then had been based on imported molds.
Then, in 1922, the Week of Modern Art took place, in which various artists, such as writers, painters, plastic artists, among others, they exhibited their creations, all gathered around a single objective: the break with conservative models before broadcast.
Although Manuel Bandeira did not participate in this event, he contributed to Klaxon Magazine, one of the magazines based on ideas revolutionaries in the face of the political situation that dominated the country at that time, as well as propagating modernist ideals in vogue.
He was also the author of several poems and prose texts such as Absolute Rhythm, also contributing to several newspapers and translating plays.
We will therefore analyze a poem by the aforementioned poet emphasizing the modernist characteristics:
Poetics
I'm fed up with measured lyricism
Of well-behaved lyricism
From the lyricism of a civil servant with a time book
protocol and expressions of appreciation to the director.
I'm tired of the lyricism that stops and goes to check in the dictionary
the vernacular imprint of a word.
Down with the purists
All words especially the universal barbarisms
All constructions especially exception syntaxes
All rhythms, especially the innumerable ones
I'm fed up with flirtatious lyricism
Political
Rickety
Syphilitic
Of all the lyricism that capitulates to whatever it is
outside of yourself
Otherwise it's not lyricism
It will be accounting table of cosines secretary of the lover
copy with one hundred models of cards and the different
ways to please women, etc.
I want the crazy lyricism first
The drunken lyricism
The hard and poignant lyricism of drunks
Shakespeare's clown lyricism
- I no longer want to know about the lyricism that is not liberation.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
Manuel Bandeira
We can see a sharp criticism regarding the exaggerated lyricism, so much preached by the authors of Romanticism, as they abused this melancholy instinct as a way to escape the reality.
It also criticizes the Parnassians, who were so attached to vernaculism and fixed forms of expression, such as sonnets. On the other hand, Modernism valued freedom of expression and the use of free verses, even in the poem itself, there is a predominance of them.
And, finally, we noticed an approximation between the spoken and written language, expressing a certain colloquialism, which was also a characteristic of the aesthetics under study.
By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
DUARTE, Vânia Maria do Nascimento. "Manuel Bandeira's creations from a Modernist perspective"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/literatura/as-criacoes-manuel-bandeira-sob-otica-modernista.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
