Padrão de Resposta

A great part of the attack on Modernism was based on the attempt to downplay its revolution by decrying its use of foreign influences. Modernism would have been as imported as our other previous cultural waves.
Almost nothing was imported; in contrast, the conquest of Brazil became one of the glories of this poetry.
Today’s poetry will get rid of mediocrity, of poetic vacuum, when it finds once again the urgent need to have a nationality, as felt so well by Mario; when it starts once again to follow the trail of intimacy with social issues; when it finally understands, as did João Cabral de Melo Neto, that the legacy of 1922 compels us to direct Brazilian poetry towards the major objective, social and philosophical themes which were rendered possible and imperative by the preparation of language undertaken by the masters of Modernism. Not because literature gets better only by the simple modification of its subject, but because no poetic language, no instrument of high expression, has ever renewed itself by the foolish experimentalism with no roots in the existence and in the world. It has always expanded itself, always raised its level and built its symbol in that precise moment in which language was open to the nervous and complex understanding of social life; of the great collective life whose vivid conscience is now being created by the country, in literature as in other realms – and of the genuine Brazilianism that the poets from 1922 set up through their effort and to their glory. (1962).