Gregório de Matos
A drawing of Gregório de Matos
Born	Gregório de Matos e Guerra (1636-04-07)7 April 1636 Salvador, Bahia, Portuguese Colony of Brazil
Died	26 November 1696(1696-11-26) (aged 60) Recife, Pernambuco, Portuguese Colony of Brazil
Pen name	Boca do Inferno
Occupation	Poet, lawyer
Nationality	Portuguese
Ethnicity	White
Alma mater	University of Coimbra
Subject	Satires
Literary movement	Baroque
Spouse	Michaella de Andrade, Maria dos Povos
Relatives	Eusébio de Matos

Gregório de Matos e Guerra (April 7, 1636 — November 26, 1696) was the most famous Colonial Brazilian Baroque poet. Although he wrote many lyrical and religious poems, he was more well known by his satirical ones, most of them frontally criticizing the Catholic Church, rendering him the nickname "Boca do Inferno" (in English: Hell's Mouth).

He is the patron of the 16th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Biography[edit]

Gregório de Matos e Guerra was born in Salvador, Bahia, to Gregório de Matos (a Portuguese nobleman) and Maria da Guerra (a matron). He studied at the Jesuit College and travelled to Lisbon in 1652, entering the University of Coimbra, where he completed his Law degree in 1661. There he became friends with poet Tomás Pinto Brandão (1664–1743) and married D. Michaella de Andrade, and, two years later, was appointed as a magistrate in Alcácer do Sal. In 1672, he served as solicitor for the city of Bahia to the Portuguese court.

In 1679 he returned to Brazil as a widower. He was married for a second time in 1691 to Maria dos Povos, but led a rather bohemian life. A malcontent, he criticized everyone and everything: the church, government and all classes of people, from the rich and powerful to the lowly pauper, sparing no race or profession. His irreverent and satiric writings eventually got him into trouble, and Gregório was exiled to Portuguese Angola in 1694, where he is said to have contracted a lethal disease. Very ill, he managed to return to Brazil the following year, but he was prohibited from entering Bahia and from distributing his poetry. He instead went to Recife, where he died in 1696. Tradition says that a few minutes before death, he asked two Catholic priests to come at him and stand each one aside of his body; thus he described himself as "dying between two thieves, like Jesus Christ in his crucifixion".

His older brother was the painter and orator Eusébio de Matos (1629–1692).

Works[edit]

The works of Gregório de Matos were not published or more well-known until the 19th century. This was because of the heavy content of his satires. During his lifetime, his poetry could only be found in private diaries and codices.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters published a collection of his poetry in six volumes:

• Sacra (Holy — volume 1, 1923)
• Lírica (Lyrical — volume 2, 1923)
• Graciosa (Gracious — volume 3, 1930)
• Satírica (Satirical — volumes 4-5, 1930)
• Última (Last — volume 6, 1933)

  Manuel Bandeira

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  Manuel Bandeira (the 3rd left to right, back row)

  Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (Recife, Pernambuco, April 19, 1886 – Rio de Janeiro, October 13, 1968) was a poet, literary critic, and translator.

  Bandeira wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather. In 1922, after an extended stay in Europe where Bandeira met many prominent authors and painters, he contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist Movement in São Paulo. Bandeira began to publish his most important works in 1924. He became a respected Brazilian author and wrote for several newspapers and magazines. He also taught Hispanic Literature in Rio de Janeiro. Bandeira began to translate into Portuguese canonical plays of world literature in 1956, something he continued to do until his last days. He died in Rio de Janeiro.

  Bandeira's poems have a unique delicacy and beauty. Recurrent themes that can be found in his works are: the love of women, his childhood in the Northeast city of Recife, friends, and health problems. His delicate health affected his poetry, and many Many of his poems depict the limits of the human body.

  He is one of Brazil's most admired and inspiring poets until today. In fact, the "rhythm bandeiriano" deserves in-depth studies of essayists. Manuel Bandeira has a simple and direct style, but does not share the hardness of poets like João Cabral de Melo Neto, also Pernambucano. Indeed, in an analysis of the works of Manuel Bandeira and Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, one sees that, unlike the latter, who aims to purge the lyricism of his work, Bandeira was the most lyrical of poets. His work addresses universal themes and everyday concerns, sometimes with an approach of "poem-a-joke", dealing with forms and inspiration that academic tradition considers vulgar.

  In addition, his vast knowledge of literature was used to speak about everyday topics, sometimes using forms taken from classical and medieval traditions. In his debut work (that had very short circulation) there are rigid poetic compositions, rich rhymes and sonnets in perfect measure. In his later work we find as the rondo compositions and ballads. His poetry, far from being a little sweet song of melancholy, is deeply concerned with a drama combining his personal history and conflicst stylistic lived by the poets of his time. Cinza das Horas—Ash from the Hours presents a great view: the hurt, the sadness, resentment, framed by the morbid style of late symbolism.

  Carnival, a book that came soon after Cinza das Horas opens with the unpredictable: the evocation of the Bacchic and satanic carnival, but it ends in the middle of melancholy. This hesitation between jubilation and joint pain will be figurative in several dimensions. Instead, happiness appears in poems like "I'm off to Passargada," where the question is dreamy evocation of an imaginary country, the Pays de Cocagne, where every desire, especially erotic, is satisfied. Passargada is not elsewhere, but an intangible place, a locus of spiritual amenus. In Bandeira, the object of desire is veiled. Adopting the trope of the Portuguese "saudade", Pasargada and many other poems are similar in a nostalgic remembrance of Bandeira's childhood, street life, as well as the everyday world of provincial Brazilian cities of the early 20th century.

  The intangible is also feminine and erotic. Torn between a sheer idealism of friendly and platonic unions and a voluptuous carnality, Manuel Bandeira is, in many of his poems, a poet of guilt. The pleasure is not accomplished by the satisfaction of desire, but it is the excitement of loss that satisfies the desire. In Dissolute Rhythm, eroticism, so morbid in the first two books, is longing, it is the dissolution of a liquid element, as it is the case of wet nights in Loneliness.

  Contents

   [hide] 

  • 1 Bibliography
  • 2 Example
  • 3 Poetry
  • 4 External links

  Bibliography[edit]

  A Literature professor, he was elected to the Brazilian Letters Academy where he was the third occupant of the 24th Chair whose patron was Júlio Ribeiro. His election took place on August 29, 1940, succeeding Luís Guimarães and he was formally introduced by academician Ribeiro Couto on November 30, 1940.

  He died at the age of 82 on October 18, 1968 in Botafogo (a borough of Rio de Janeiro). His funeral took place at the grand hall of the Brazilian Letters Academy and he was buried at the St. John the Baptist (Port. São João Batista) Cemetery.