Figurations of the Oswaldian Mangrove in the poetics of Caetano Veloso

Abstract

Through the methodology of comparative research between reading poems and listening to popular songs, this article will verify the resonances and figurations of the Mangue, notably in the dramatic poem Santeiro do Mangue (1950), by the modernist Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), in the songwriting work of Caetano Veloso, an artist of the sung word who, since the emergence of the Tropicália movement, in the late 1960s, assumed the anthropophagy as an ethical and aesthetic operational mode for his songs and interpretations of Brazilian culture. There is an affirmation of the powers of the Oswaldian Mangrove in the Caetanic work, which neither denies nor exoticizes the country's underdevelopment, on the contrary, it affirms its poetic powers.