The poet-critic Mario Faustino’s long essays

Abstract

The poet-critic Mário Faustino (1930-1962), victim of an airplane accident at the age of thirty-two, at the height of his production, is rarely ignored by scholars of the 1950s Brazilian poetry and literary critics. The poems he published and the discussions he engaged on his weekly page in the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, entitled “Poesia-Experiência” (1956-1958), became unavoidable topics of the literary debates of that period. This article aims to present some of Faustino’s critical-creative career facts, in order to contextualize and address one part of the author’s works that deserves more attention: the part of the long essays, especially those called “Diálogos de oficina.” We undertook our investigation in six brief stages: in the first, we present an overview of the author’s career, highlighting the aesthetic challenges he sought to overcome; in the second, the way in which Faustino’s works were developed, in order to elucidate the strategic position of the three essays/manufactory dialogues chosen for discussion in the next stages; in the third, the way in which his final writings were based on a specific proposition of a poetics of fragments; in the fourth, the author’s thoughts on the poetry-society relationship that are the basis of the essay “Poetry for what?”; in the fifth, Faustino’s proposals on the poet-world and poetry-objects relations that are notable on the essays “The poet and his world” and “What is poetry?”; finally, we summarize our arguments about the position taken by the poet-critic Faustino in relation to the Brazilian poetic system.