Soares de Passos, Álvares de Azevedo e a Escola Cemiterial lusófona

Abstract

In Portuguese and Brazilian literary historiography, the bifurcation of Romanticism into three phases implied a certain disdain for the second generation in both countries. This contempt, already manifested in the hyperbolic nickname that designates it – “ultraromanticism” – seems to have distorted critics’ lens to scrutinize the inflections in this romantic strand. Based on the premise that this phase is more nuanced than historiography presumes, this article examines the extent to which it was outlined in Portugal and Brazil a Escola Cemiterial analogous to the British Graveyard School, with which literary men from both countries came into contact. To this end, I compare the poems “O noivado do sepulchro”, by Soares de Passos, and “O poeta moribundo”, by Álvares de Azevedo, since both encapsulate idiosyncrasies of this Lusophone counterpart and explore them with more finesse than their peers. A comparative assessment of these texts shows that one and the other are based on the reconciliation of two aesthetic categories, the tragic and the grotesque, insofar as the former provides the thematic basis (the death of the self or the other) and the latter its treatment (the unusual or the comic). In “O noivado do sepulchro”, the approach to death harmonizes the tragic (the separation of the lovers) and the grotesque (the reunion of the corpses) in such a way that both are mutually attenuated and the ballad is neither macabre nor burlesque. In “O poeta moribundo”, for its turn, the tragic and the grotesque intermingle in an agonistic way, since the tragic nature of death is countered by the comic nature of its representation.