[Carlos Drummond de Andrade is] eminently Brazilian, with an acute eye for the ridicule, steely irony, skepticism tempered by tenderness and vice-versa and, above all, his flawless congeniality to the complex and contradictory state of mind and soul that is "to be Brazilian."

Although he wrote in one of his arts poétiques, "Do not make lines out of events," it is impossible to dissociate his poetry from the "events" of literary and social history since 1922. Not that he took facts as themes, but in the sense that facts created an atmosphere, intellectual and emotional, which reflected and certainly conditioned the "atmosphere" of his poetry…. Each one of his main volumes corresponds to a particular moment in the history and evolution of literary principles and moral concepts. In 1930 Alguma poesia was the book of victorious modernismo and the no less victorious inauguration of the Second Republic. (p. 16)

The...