João Cabral de Melo Neto e as exigências da crítica da segunda metade do século XX

This article studies the relationships of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto’s work with the Brazilian criticism of the second half of the 20th century. Starting from the notion that the poet comes out as one of the most influential and expressive voices in Brazilian poetry of his time, the emphasis is transferred to the atmosphere of the criticism, understood as the criticism that was written on the poet and the criticism that the poet himself formulated. In order to deal with both, references are made to the ambience of modernity in which they developed, emphasizing the idea that Cabral’s formulations about literature and art maintain commitments with the construction of the ideal of modernity in Brazil of the last decades of the century. At the same time, such formulations receive echoes or special emphasis in the score of the interpretation, thus founding a kind of tradition which we will examine and question here.