Note 1 — I CASTRO ALVES

“It has already been said,” writes Verissimo, “that the Latins have no poetry, but rather eloquence; they confound sentimental emotion, which is the predicate of poetry, with intellectual sensation, which is the attribute of eloquence. There is in the poetry of the so-called Latin peoples more rhetoric than spontaneity, more art than nature, more artifice than simplicity. It is more erudite, more ‘laboured,’ more intellectual, and for that reason less felt, less sincere, less ingenuous than that of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example. I do not discuss this notion. We Brazilians, who are scarcely half Latin, are highly sensitive, I know, to poetic rhetoric,—which does not prevent us, however, from being moved by the sentimentalism of poetry—though superficially—when it comes in the simple form of popular lyrism and sings, as that does, with its naïve rhetoric, the sensual passions of our amorous ardor, which is characteristic of hybrids. Examples of this are Casimiro de Abreu, Laurindo Rabello, Varella and Gonçalves Dias himself. When the poets became refined, and wrapped their passion, real or feigned—and in fact rather feigned than real—in the sightly and false externals of the Parnassian rhetoric, bending all their efforts toward meticulous perfection of form, rhyme, metre, sound, they ceased to move the people, or impressed it only by the outer aspect of their perfect poems through the sonority of their verses. For at bottom, what we prefer is form, but form that is rhetorical and eloquent, or what seems to us such,—palavrão (wordiness), emphasis, beautiful images.…”