Adélia Prado: Romanticism Revisited
1992; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9957
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIn the United States, her first volume of poetry, Bagagem, was celebrated Carolyn Richmond in similarly glowing terms: the critic speaks of beautiful and highly original book-a work which firmly establishes the forty-year-old poet's importance in contemporary letters.2 Yet despite these initial celebrations, her work has since been greeted a growing critical silence-thus even today the specific strategies and strengths of Adelia Prado's poetry remain largely undefined and unacknowledged. While Prado's poetry does indeed begin by rooting itself in Romanticism,3 for instance, it tends to focus and mediate that Romanticism in particular ways. Prado takes the Romantic strategy of distilling poetic strength from personal loss and makes it seem the particular province of women. At the same time, she modifies ever so slightly the stereotypical figures of women inherited from the Romantic tradition. She makes a virtue of secondariness, of belatedness, of a position which is at first subordinate but soon becomes central in a process of mediation and mutual enclosure. In this essay, I attempt a close reading of a number of poems-primarily those in the first volume, Bagagem-as examples of these various strategies and poetic approaches. My underlying assumption throughout will be that the basic issue for Prado is the question of how a woman poet may come to power in a world where creativity-God as father and as poet-is defined as inescapably male. Perhaps the strongest poem in Bagagem, As mortes sucessivas, is at once a classic example of the elegiac strain of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry4 and a highly personal revisioning of that mode:
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