Que se engastou do lord bardo amante
Na fronte heroica de immortal grandeza.
Tua escura laguna ja não sente
Da antiga serenata o som plangente,
E os soluços de amor que nos teus barcos.
Exhalava a patricia voluptuosa.…
Resta-te apenas a canção saudosa
Das gemedoras pombas de São Marcos.[3]
“Machado de Assis,” writes Carvalho,[4] “was a poet of greater resources and fuller metrical invention than Luiz Guimarães. His poetry … reveals a psychological intensity rarely attained in this country. Possessing a firm classical education, a profound knowledge of those humanities which in seventeenth century France were the distinguishing characteristic of the honnête homme, Machado succeeded in stamping upon his verses a truly singular impress of subtlety and discretion. His images are, as a rule, of a perfect realism, a clearness worthy of the old masters. His images are veritable parables.…” But, to one foreigner at least,—and, I suspect, to more than one Brazilian, Machado de Assis as a poet is cold, not often achieving artistic communication; he is colourful, maybe, but his colours are seen through a certain diaphanous mist that rubs off their bloom. What Carvalho would find in the man’s verses I discover, strangely enough, in his remarkable prose—his humorism, his pessimism. The themes most certainly inhere in his verse, but they are expressed at their best, most artistically developed, in his prose. Carvalho, seeking to rectify the position of this great figure in the history of Brazilian letters, would even make of him a pioneer. “This feeling of the tragico quotidiano,” he asserts, “which only today is beginning to enter into Brazilian poetry, was first revealed to our literature by Machado de Assis. Although such notes are not frequent nor many in his work, it is none the less true that, before him, they were completely unknown.… Even in his poetry, his poetry that has been so unjustly judged and so pettily understood, Machado de Assis is a pioneer, an originator of the first order. It was natural for his art not to be to the taste of the popular palate; it did not resound with the fireworks and the hoarse cries of Brazil’s most loudly applauded verse-manufacturers.”[5]
Pioneering, however, is not poetry. In art, the idea belongs to him who makes the best use of it. In Machado de Assis, the thought often subjected the emotion; this was characteristic of the man’s peculiar psychology. I would not be understood as denigrating his poetic memory; far from it. But in my opinion (and I can speak for no one else) he is in the conventional sense, only secondarily a poet, and a secondary poet.