Paulicéia Desvairada is a collection of poems by Mário de Andrade

Mário de Andrade

Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada in 1922...

, published in 1922. It was Andrade's second poetry collection, and his most controversial and influential. Andrade's free use of meter

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

 introduced revolutionary European modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal.

Composition

"Paulicéia" is a nickname for São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

, the city of Andrade's birth and the city in which the book was published. Within individual poems in the collection, Andrade occasionally refers to the city as "Paulicéia." Jack E. Tomlins's translation, the only one in English, is titled Hallucinated City. The collection takes place in São Paulo and is tied to the city in myriad ways, both artistically and historically. It grew directly out of Andrade's experiences at the center of the São Paulo arts scene in the year leading up to 1922, the watershed year of the Brazilian

Literature of Brazil

Brazilian literature is written in the Portuguese language by Brazilians or in Brazil, even if prior to Brazil's independence from Portugal, in 1822...

 Modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 movement of which Andrade was the chief literary figure. In the mythology of the book Andrade himself created, it grew out of a transcendently alienating experience Andrade had in 1920: his family's anger over his purchase of a (in their view) blasphemous

Blasphemy

Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...

 sculpture by Victor Brecheret

Victor Brecheret

Victor Brecheret was an Italian-Brazilian sculptor. He lived most of his life in São Paulo, except for his studies in Paris in his early twenties...

. There is no doubt that Brecheret and the other young artists and writers in Andrade's circle—chiefly Oswald de Andrade

Oswald de Andrade

José Oswald de Andrade Souza was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo....

, Anita Malfatti

Anita Malfatti

Anita Catarina Malfatti is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil...

, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo , known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences...

 and Menotti del Picchia

Menotti Del Picchia

Paulo Menotti Del Picchia was a Brazilian poet, journalist, and painter. He is associated with the Generation of 1922, the first generation of Brazilian modernists....

—influenced the development of the book. It was written, much like the parallel modernist masterpiece The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

, backwards: Andrade explains in the preface that he began with a very long, hastily written, and rather unstructured work which was then gradually whittled down into its final state.

Structure and approach

The book consists of 22 short poems, each a single image of a segment of São Paulo life, followed by a long poem "As Enfibraturas do Ipiranga" ("The Moral Fibrature of the Ipiranga"), described as "A Profane Oratorio

Oratorio

An oratorio is a large musical composition including an orchestra, a choir, and soloists. Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias...

" and complete with specific but impossible stage directions: "All of the 550,000 singers quickly clear their throats and take exaggeratedly deep breaths" (81). Andrade read several of these poems during the Week of Modern Art

Week of Modern Art

The Modern Art Week was an arts festival in São Paulo, Brazil, that ran from February 11 to February 18, 1922...

 (Semana de Arte Moderna) in February, 1922, which he organized in collaboration with Di Cavalcanti, Malfatti, and several others. He also read an essay, written after the poems were completed, describing their theoretical basis in retrospect; this essay was published as an introduction to the collection, with the tongue-in-cheek title "Extremely Interesting Preface."

The poems, which contain neither meter

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

 nor rhyme

Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...

 and which are primarily not written in complete sentences but rather in short, rhythmic phrases, were greeted with catcalls at the initial reading, though many in the audience still recognized their significance. In form they are utterly new; in theme they are strikingly dark, and concerned with the least glamorous corners of the city's society in a way that was quite new to Brazilian poetry. "Tristura" ("Sadness") begins:

Profundo. Imundo meu coração . . . Olha o edifício: Matadouros da Continental. Os vícios viciaram-me na bajulação sem sacrifícios . . . Minha alma corcunda como a avenida São João . . .

Deep down. Filthy my heart . . . Look at the building: Continental Slaughterhouses. Vices have corrupted me in false adulation without sacrifices . . . My soul hunchbacked like the Avenue St. John . .

Dedication

As published later in the same year as the Week of Modern Art, the book's militant sense of artistic innovation is foregrounded, from start to finish. The dedication is to Mário de Andrade himself, and begins:

Beloved Master,

    In the many brief hours which you made me spend at your side, you often spoke of your faith in free and sincere art; and I received the courage of my Truth and pride in my Ideal not from myself but from your experience. Allow me now to offer you this book which came to me from you. Please God, may you never be vexed by the brutal doubt of Adrien Sixte . . .

Responding to the traditional poetic appeal to the classical muse

Muse

The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...

s and to God, Andrade places both within himself, and asks himself not to suffer the doubt of Adrien Sixte, a character in a novel by Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...

, Le Disciple, who, as a professor of philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, argues calmly and rationally for positivism and naturalism

Naturalism (philosophy)

Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...

without admitting the stark pessimism of those ideas into his own untroubled life, until a student, taking them perhaps more seriously than he does, acts on them severely, and someone dies. For Andrade, being Mário de Andrade meant never quailing from the severity of his convictions.