Two elegies of Joaquim Cardozo

Abstract

Elegy, a genre that has received a special prominence in modern Brazilian poetry, presents in the twentieth century a melancholic, desolate subject with no hope of comfort in the future. This assumption can be noticed in Joaquim Cardozo, author of poems with a highly melancholic and elegiac diction. The aim of this study was to analyze two elegies of this poet, “Elegia para Benedito Monteiro” and “Para José Maria (de Albuquerque e Melo)”, especially directed to two fellows who were particularly significant in their poetic activity, and who belonged to a specific group of artists and intellectuals in the 1920s in Recife. In a general way, this review proposed to discuss such elegies from two perspectives: in the first, we sought to understand the poetic processes with which Cardozo takes this genre, and how it reshapes new modulations for the form, indicating the perspectives assumed by him face the propositions of his aesthetic and historical moment; in the second, we tried to trace how such elegies document a group that still deserves to be better discussed by the literary studies. In order to do so, some literary critics were used to study this poet from Pernambuco and the modern poetry from this place, such as Souza Barros (1972), Merquior (1996), Correia (2018).