A suspicious and modern poet

interpretation of Brazil in the first works of Carlos Drummod de Andrade

Abstract

This article presents a reading of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s first books of poems, considering them as an early overcoming of the main contradictions of the first moment of Brazilian modernism, with special focus on the expression of a national identity through the rescue of an unofficial Brazilianness as intended by the early modernists. The main hypothesis of the article is that the poetics of young Drummond are formally configured to highlight the limits of the modernist project by constituting itself above all as a poetry of distrust to modernist nationalism and by problematizing Brazilian life.