Ferreira Gullar

Abstract

This essay is an effort to offer an interpretation of the work of Ferreira Gullar, Brazil’s most important living poet, that would not privilege his experimental over engaged verse, or vice-versa, but would encompass them within a larger framework. Instead of reducing one to the other, or depicting them as gradually evolving side by side, the text argues that with the notion of intensity a new kind of tense unity emerges in Gullar’s oeuvre, which now can be seen as a seismograph registering the rise of a new kind of language in Brazilian society: the language of the culture industry and of commodities, which the lyric both mirrors and reworks.