José Bonifácio, Shakespeare and the greeks: the language of Brazil and the national image

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between politics and poetry in Brazil in the first half of the eighteenth century. José Bonifácio's reflections on poetry and translation are considered symptoms of the exhaustion of a set of classical values that have oriented his generation. In 1825 Bonifácio was conscious about the necessity of building up a new space of experience able to guide the new Brazilian Empire in the construction of its destiny. The enlightened rationalism crisis, deepened by the conflicts generated by the Brazilian Independence process, demanded the formulation of new forms of collective identity. Bonifácio tried to overcome both the colonial hierarchical mosaic of identities and the cold cosmopolitism of enlightened rationalism.