Tomás Antônio Gonzaga: duplo personagem

Abstract

The pastoral convention is a remarkable trait of Brazilian Arcadian poetry. The poet, disguised as a shepherd, lends his voice to a fiction in which his identity and his personal biography become obliterated. In Marília de Dirceu, the process of creating the pastoral mask is complicated by the intrusion of some of the poet’s autobiographical traits in his literary work. It’s no more the case, here, of only finding the convention or of detecting the amount of ‘sincerity’ or confidence that is in it. One must find an imbrication in which a mutual dependence is present. In this reading of the book, the instances are interpreted as the two poles of a unique sense generating movement, of a major fiction that founds, in a large and complex way, the poetical universe of his poems.