Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes poems written by Brazilian mulato Neoclassic poet Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga, during his Atlantic voyage to Brazil after studying at Coimbra University in 1777. The difference between images, poetic forms, and genre are suggestive of the political place in which Silva Alvarenga is inscribing both himself and the colonial intellectual.

Paper long abstract:

The year of 1777 witnessed a huge political change, the fall of the marquis of Pombal, and a relatively smaller event, the return of the Brazilian mulato poet Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga to his homeland. Silva Alvarenga had graduated from Coimbra University the previous year and had published four poems since his arriving into Portugal, a great achievement at that time for a beginner, so the decision of leaving the country was not an obvious one from the point of view of a promising literary career. Perhaps his involvement with Pombal’s politics is a key to understanding his reasons. The poems he wrote during his voyage, a series of satiric comments on the precariousness of the ship, are interesting because they contrast the poetic imagery of Neoclassical culture used in “O Templo de Netuno”, the idealized portrait of the same trip. In this way, “O Templo de Netuno” could be read as the intellectual proposal to the New World, and it’s interesting how the images used by Silva Alvarenga can be traced to the Dutch books which circulated in Portugal, both in this particular poem as well as in the previous ones. Also, the political allegory created in “O Templo de Netuno” and after developed in “A Gruta Americana” indicates a tendency to blend Pombal’s project with the new course represented by the “Viradeira”. The apparent innocent poetic fantasias, until now, read as nationalistic insights from a pre-romantic poet are, indeed, political statements about the place of Brazil and Portugal in the symbolic world of late Eighteenth Century.