Multitudinous Heart

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In his last interview, given just weeks before his death in 1987, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (droo-MOHND djee ahn-DRAH-djee) said that his long and prolific career of poetry was not motivated by literary ambition but by “the need to express sensations and emotions that troubled my spirit and caused me anguish.” Poetry, he explained, had served him as an “analyst’s couch.” It is hard to take seriously his denial of literary ambition, since as a young man his goal in life was clearly to write the finest poetry he could write. Once he became established as Brazil’s greatest living poet (his only competitor for the title was João Cabral de Melo Neto, 1920–1999), he could relax, and the decreased poetic tension of his later work shows that he did relax. But what about the notion of poetry as self-expression and psychological self-analysis? It is a notion not necessarily in conflict with the idea of poetry as an artistic pursuit. For a man like Drummond, naturally taciturn, art was perhaps the ideal medium for exploring and expressing his feelings. Those feelings were not simply expressed, however; they were transformed. There was a metamorphic relationship between his life and his art.

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