A invenção do Expressionismo em Augusto dos Anjos

Abstract

Abstract: Strongly influenced by Schopenhauer s philosophy and by the Buddhist thinking; tapping the innovative vibrations from Baudelaire s poetry; taken by thirst for knowledge with no answer from the science; driven by the microscopic world that only then started to be explored; and the reflex of a changing country in a changing world, Augusto dos Anjos poetry finds it Zeitgeist, the Dionysian spirit of its time, in an expression never before seen in Brazilian poetry, which confused, for a long time, its critical reception. His older poems had already brought the mark of a melancholic lyric I, stricken by loneliness and reflection. In the middle of 1906 this melancholy overflows and the expression, which had become rougher, finally meets its tone. It was no longer the lyric I that expressed itself, but a ramification of it: a suffering, misanthropic, misogynistic character, who seemed to have only one purpose in life to suffer. With the melancholy in exponential growth, that character ripens not only the language, but also the reflections. We intent to show that, running from the confessional lyricism and based upon Schopenhauer s concept of aesthetic pain , the author forged a character, his lyric mask. Its purpose was to denounce the degradation humanity was going through, by the means of poems which subverted the accepted notions of beauty. Augusto dos Anjos invented an expressionist variation, seeking a non- Aristotelic representation of reality, using a fragmented and contrasting form, thus approaching the German expressionists, which makes it completely plausible to classify him as an expressionist poet. And it is not only an expressionist sensibility , but corpus and an idea integrally expressionist. Without fearing the grotesque and the kitsch, extracting beauty from bad taste and decaying matter, Augusto dos Anjos registered Brazilian life on the verge of the twentieth century