Modernist poetry: gestures of air and of stone

Abstract

Here a discussion is proposed on what kind of analysis one can carry out with the Guia de Ouro Preto (1938) and with the poem “Ouro Preto” (1940), both by Manuel Bandeira. The relation with the visual, both in the guide and in the poem is marked by a modernist point of view in face of the colonial city. The images there pictured are not thought of in a relation absence-presence, but in the possibility of fixating them as cornerstones, as memory. The analysis here presented interrogates about the breath of time in the images of the works and also strives to discover the paradoxical affinities between air and stone, that is, between the atmosphere and the raw matter of that art known as colonial, affinities that reenact the relations between the dance and the tomb of Modernism with the colonial art, and thus, Baroque art.