O poema em prosa no Brasil: ângulos de experimentação

Abstract

Many of Cruz e Sousa and Raul Pompeia’s prose poems may be read as a metaphor for the prose poem’s écriture and its work-in-progress style. Also, in their ambivalence, they may represent the provisional status of the Brazilian society, ever-changing and ready to reinvent itself, in part because of its dependence of international capital. Nevertheless, as these prose poems implicitly mention the historical context, mostly due to its formal aspects, they criticize what the Brazilian elites of the late 19th century had always wished for, i.e., Europe in the tropics. This essay explores the critical potentiality of the prose poem in Cruz e Sousa and Raul Pompeia through stylistic aspects, such as incompleteness, deformity and monstrosity.