[The keynote of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's first volume of poetry], and to a great extent the keynote of [his] poetry to the present, can be isolated in the first lyric from Alguma Poesia, "Poema de sete faces." Here Drummond expresses the impossibility of reconciling his own values with those of the world. This dissonance, this friction between systems, not even a perfect rhyme will remedy, and there is no choice but to be "gauche." (p. 58)

While Drummond does not find in perfect rhyme the magic link with which to resolve the differences between the individual and his wasted spiritual ecology—finds it, in fact, a pseudo-solution—he never wholly gave up various kinds of formal patterning. (p. 59)

What was never clear during the early years of modernism, what was blurred by both proximity and polemic, now with hindsight becomes much clearer. From the beginning Drummond attempted to...