The science of science’s poetry in Augusto dos Anjos

Abstract

This article presents a study on the dialogue between the ideas and the aesthetics of Augusto dos Anjos. What is meant to be postulated is that the Paraiba’s poet puts his vigorous aesthetic to the service of ideas that were expurgated from the literary and academic scene under the label of vitalism, in favor of the hegemony of mechanism. Aesthetic images, the use of a nearly completely denotative scientific language, and morbidity, as paroxysms of this aesthetic project are not really an isolated initiative of the poet, but not even his contemporaries understood the greatness of his project and how it was necessary, to accomplish it, that he raises his poetics to an unusual aesthetic level. Augusto dos Anjos, even on the fringes of the elitist epicenter of Ouvidor Street (where his accent and his color would have no place), succeeded in constructing a true poetics of denotation that became one of the most radical bulwarks of a literature that, by yours hands, entered modernity.