Book, Lira messenger: Drummond and the modernist group from Minas Gerais[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Since the 1970s, Sergio Miceli has stood out as a student of the trajectory of intellectuals. His many works transformed the way we understand the relationships between culture and society. This book continues that singular project. At the center of the analysis are Carlos Drummond de Andrade and his contemporaries in Minas Gerais. In his early twenties, Drummond had fewer assets than his colleagues. His training was in pharmacy — the natural path would be law. He had just consummated a marriage that did not bring him economic or social capital. And his family was broke. His proximity to Gustavo Capanema, interventionist in Minas and later a strongman of the Estado Novo, is the key that makes not only his professional career in his youth intelligible, but also the possibilities of his poetic expression. If the contribution of Drummond's work cannot be reduced to this circumstance — and Miceli is the first to recognize this —, it also cannot be understood away from this context. Lira Mensageira also brings insights into São Paulo modernism and the political class in the Vargas Era. In an essay focusing on the debut works of Cassiano Ricardo, Menotti del Picchia, Ribeiro Couto, Guilherme de Almeida, Plínio Salgado, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, Miceli outlines an overview of the literary writing that would be part of the Week of 22, studded with tensions that would be diluted in later critical fortunes. In the third and final text, the author examines the political elite of the 1930s and 1940s based on the clash between the National Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, still recognizable today in the features of the Brazilian ruling class.