In Looking for Poetry, from A rosa do povo (Rose of the People, 1945), Carlos Drummond de Andrade investigates the writing process through a succession of negations. As the title suggests, patience and the ability to respect poetry’s caprices are essential qualities of a poet.

In the first stanza, daily events and personal feelings are deemed useless for poetry, for poetry remains impassible before life’s complications and human suffering (“Next to it [poetry], life is a static sun / without warmth or light”).

In the second stanza, the speaker touches upon remembrance, a recurrent theme in Drummond de Andrade’s works, only to deny its crucial significance to poetry. The “secret of houses”—family life—and the “movement of machines” (which refers to society’s recent changes) are described as unacceptable subject matters since poetry “leaves out subject and object.”

Riches, history, tradition, pain, and love are all proven ephemeral, and therefore worthless, by the destructive action of time, whose selective ability becomes an ally to poetry (“What faded was not poetry. / What broke was not crystal”).

As the fifth stanza states, neither the mirror (the poet’s present image) nor memory (the account of the poet’s past) can be considered the keys to writing poetry. In the poem’s first five stanzas (which include 13 imperative forms in the original), events, feelings, memory, and history are eliminated as possible key elements, or themes.

It may seem at this point that readers are left with nothing, and one could ask, what is left for its author, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, whose works (“Caso do vestido” [Story of the Dress] in A rosa do povo and “Viagem na família” [Traveling in the Family] in José, for example) so often explore the themes that are discarded here?

The last four stanzas resolve readers’ apprehensions by presenting the “kingdom of words,” a place where poems find themselves “in dictionary condition,” dormant and waiting to be written. Extreme care is an important quality for those responsible for the poems’ awakening.

True poets must live with each emergent poem and understand its needs and demands, “its command of words / and its command of silence.” According to Looking for Poetry, poets are responsible for arranging words in a way that some of their manifold latent meanings can become available to readers. Without poets the words would “hide in the night” and be forgotten.

Toward the end of the poem, it becomes clear that Drummond de Andrade does not intend to restrict the scope of certain poetic themes by describing them as “unacceptable.” As his own works prove, any event can become the theme of a poem.

In Looking for Poetry, its speaker points to the uselessness, nonetheless, of good ideas and true feelings in the absence of a close relationship between poet and words. As this poem suggests, the writer’s ability to invite readers to explore hidden facets of words is the most challenging aspect of being a poet.

Bibliography
Drummond de Andrade, Carlos. Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems. Edited by Thomas Colchie and Mark Strand, translated by Elizabeth Bishop and Gregory Rabassa. New York and Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1986, 50–51.

Categories: British Literature, Latin American Literature, Literature

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