João Cabral de Melo Neto: leituras para além da narrativa crítica do rigor construído

Abstract

This work aims to propose the possibility of making alternative readings of João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry, following paths other than the one that has been consecrated over the decades as a possible critical narrative of approach to his work,where Cabral, among other statements, as a rigorous, difficult, anti-poetic and “soulless” poet. It was necessary to go throught he poet's initial critical fortune, from when he did no treach the prestige of a national poet until the recent canons of Brazilian criticism that consecrated him as a cerebral poet, anti-musical, engineer, among other adjectives, forming a possible critical narrative of approaching the Cabral's work that, in general terms, was dominated by terms such as “rigor”, “construction”, “lucidity”, among others,that guide this interpretation process.This unidirectional perspective of analysis,as the present work intends to demonstrate, seems to have inhibited or prevented, consequently, other possibilities of readings and critical understanding of Cabral poetry. For this, thiswork made clippings ofthe most important critical texts of this critical tradition that focused on the work of the poet-diplomat to investigate the limits of this critical narrative, delimitingitand questioning its limits, with a view to leaving it in abeyance, opening a parenthesis withinthe scope of literary criticism itself, so that other paths canbe glimpsed, ending with a panoramic analysis of a poem by Cabral. In this analysis, the as sumptions of a formalist starting point to analyze the work of the poet were left inabeyance,to allow the proposition of another approach to the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto.