Nymph in flower: the legs, the enigma, the hot dances of Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Abstract

This research project aims to think about the figurations of the Nymph - understood as a feminine form in movement - in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. From the survival of this image cames from pagan antiquity and its metamorphoses in Drummond's poetry, we intend to problematize the place that such work occupies in our literary historiography, seeing it not as the incarnation and maximum expression of the modernist ideology marked by the rupture between different historical moments, but as a work that may be one of the most complex of our literature, in which the impulse towards the new coexists with all sorts of anachronisms and survivals. In the place of overcoming and oppositions, seem to insinuate into Drummond's poetics images unsuspected connections, links of times that point to a less linear and more symptomatic historiography. In this sense, Nymph proposes a trans-historical model that implodes the walls, the schemes, the styles, the identities, opening the way to think Drummond's poetry not as a well-resolved and finished work in itself, but as an accident-work, crossed by fundamental concerns, showing itself wandering, convulsive, elusive as Nymph. The erotic desire, of which Nymph is an image, appears, in our hypothesis, as a kind of subterranean river that cross all Drummond's poetry, assuming different positions in the three movements that we propose in our hypothesis of reading Drummond's poetry. To the "kidnapped" desire in the first moment, remained the option of disguising, deforming, disfiguring, until, at the outbreak of the crisis, such desire flows subtly to the surface, preparing a poetic gesture visible in the Drummond's last books which restores eroticism to its political status.