“A purely spiritualistic attitude”, reading Festim (1922) by Guilherme de Almeida

Abstract

It is well known the effort of Brazilian critics of the early twentieth century to establish a relationship between modern poetry and its symbolist heritage. According to Alceu Amoroso Lima, symbolism opened up “new paths” and had “the great merit of driving poetry to its native cradle – the mystery”. Andrade Muricy and Tasso da Silveira also carried out a revision of the symbolism in its relation with modern poetry, European and Brazilian, through the edition of the works of Cruz e Souza, Bernardino Lopes, Emiliano Perneta or the exhaustive Panorama of Brazilian symbolism (Muricy, 1952), published in two volumes. This one brings together the production of the poets precursors of the Brazilian symbolism going until Manuel Bandeira, Cecília Meireles or Onestaldo de Pennafort. The purpose of this article is to go through one of the main keys to reading this tradition, espirituality, to which Alceu Amoroso Lima has added yet another, political, in his article titled “The Espiritualist Reaction”. It is a question of incorporating, from this key, the book Festim de Guilherme de Almeida – who was one of the principal translators of Baudelaire and Verlaine – a book considered by the poet, in the 30s, as the work where he could “keep a purely espiritualist attitude”.