Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

* * *

Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade have been mentioned; other poets in the Modernist movement are included in this anthology. Carlos Drummond de Andrade is regarded as the most important — and is probably the most popular — poet of the contemporary period. Vinicius de Moraes is also extremely popular, especially with the younger generation, some of whom are ignorant of his early and more serious work, but adore him for his “Bossa Nova” songs (a style now considered out-of-date), and his present constant outpouring of gentle, romantic songs and music, almost invariably about love.

The most recent date marking a shift in poetic styles in Brazil is 1945, the year of the dropping of the first atomic bomb — about which every Brazilian poet seems to have written at least one poem — and the end of World War II. Brazil itself was just coming to the end of a dictatorship that had lasted for fifteen years and was passing through a phase of redemocratization. It was the year of the death of Mário de Andrade, and a new generation of poets was appearing on the scene, the Neo-Modernists, or the generation of ’45. As early as 1929 the writer Luis Martins had remarked: “Modernism suffered from the demoralizing influence of its adherents. As in the time of Parnassianism everyone wrote sonnets, in the time of Modernism everyone began to write nonsense in free verse.” The generation of ’45 was against the exaggerated use of the free verse that had dominated poetry for more than twenty years; they wanted more concision and less sentimentality (always a danger in Brazilian verse) as well as a more accurate use of words.

João Cabral de Melo Neto, born in 1920, came of age in this generation; today he is considered one of the major poetic voices in Latin America. His first book Stone of Sleep (1942) showed the characteristics of his mature style: striking visual imagery and an insistent use of concrete, tactile nouns. He is “difficult”; but at the present time his work displays the highest development and the greatest coherency of style of any Brazilian poet.

The younger poets, many, diverse, and talented, including the Concretionists and others whose work takes the form of song lyrics — and Brazil has produced in recent years some of the best popular songs ever written — are not in this anthology. The editors hope to introduce them in a second volume, in order to give the American reader a more complete picture of the variety, profundity, and originality of Brazilian poetry today.

The Editors

1972

I had hoped that this photograph, so unflattering to almost everyone in it, would never be seen again. The occasion was a party for Edith and Osbert Sitwell, given by LIFE Magazine, at the Gotham Bookmart. I hadn’t wanted to attend, but Marianne Moore was firm about it. “We must be polite to the Sitwells,” she said, and so I went. There were a great many people there. The photographers, as is their custom, were not polite. There were difficulties in separating the poets from the non-poets (some of whom wanted to be in the picture, too) and in herding the poets into the back room to be photographed. (In the fray, a few got left out.) Poets tripped over trailing wires and jostled each other to get in the front row, or in the back row, depending. They were arranged, hectored, and re-arranged. Miss Moore’s hat was considered to be too big: she refused to remove it. Auden was one of the few who seemed to be enjoying himself. He got into the picture by climbing on a ladder, where he sat making loud, cheerful comments over our heads.

The picture was taken with a sort of semi-circular swoop of the camera, with two hesitations and clicks. The poets at the clicks (I was one) came out looking rather odd. (Seeing the picture in LIFE, one of my best friends told me I looked like a salt-cellar with the top screwed on the wrong way.) I was wearing a small velvet cap and after the party Miss Moore said regretfully, “I wish I’d worn a minimal hat like that.”

* * *

I met Auden only a few times, and although I wanted to, I was a little afraid of talking to him. I regret this now very much. I find it sad that the young students and poets I have met in the past four years usually seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces, rarely read him at all, and apparently never for pleasure. One reason for this may be that Auden, the most brilliant of imitators himself, has been, or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems overfamiliar, old hat. But when I was in college, and all through the thirties and forties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscape, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our late-depression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual courage — actually more honest than Ginsberg’s, say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew —about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism — what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.

I almost always agree with Auden critically, except when he gets bogged down in his categories (and except that I haven’t yet been able to read Tolkien), and I admire almost all his poems except the later preachy ones. I’d like to quote some characteristic lines:

Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle.

*

Easily my dear, you move, easily your head,

And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led

Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,

Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood,

Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe

And the Danube flood.

*

We made all possible preparations,

Drew up a list of firms,

Constantly revised our calculations

And allotted the farms …

*

For to be held for friend

By an undeveloped mind

To be joke for children is

Death’s happiness

Whose anecdotes betray

His favorite color as blue

Colour of distant bells

And boys’ overalls.

*

Now the leaves are falling fast,

Nurse’s flowers will not last;

Nurses to the graves are gone,

And the prams go rolling on.

*

From SPAIN, 1937

Many have heard it on the remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman’s islands,

In the corrupt heart of the city;

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes; they came to present their lives.

*

From REFUGEE BLUES

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in;

But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, they weren’t German Jews.

Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,

Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:

Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;

They had no politicians and sang at their ease:

They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

These verses and many, many more of Auden’s have been part of my mind for years — I could say, part of my life.