Book, Poets who thought the world[LS]

"In times of barbarity, let us therefore turn to poets and their cosmogonies", says Adauto Novaes in the introduction to this book, which goes from Lucrécio, who wrote "the most original and most vigorous book of Latin poetry", passing through the Inferno of Dante, until arriving at Drummond's "Machine of the World". The poet-philosophers who participate in this collection deal not only with poetry, but with the history of thought through poetry. In the poetic act, says Maurice Blanchot, "language ceases to be an instrument and shows itself in its essence, which is to found a world". The same essence of thought, which founds things and human reality. "Every great poet is a particularly powerful exciter," says Adauto. Given the multiple paths that this book takes, the reader starts wherever they want. Here is the modern (and melancholy) look at Baudelaire, as seen by Jorge Coli and Olgária Matos; Drummond's systematic denial of the world, under the eyes of José Miguel Wisnik; the philosophical and political doubts of Paul Valéry, exposed by Michel Déguy; the metaphysics of Fernando Pessoa, by Haquira Osakabe; and also Hölderlin (by Antonio Cicero), TS Eliot (by Benedito Nunes), Homer (by Antonio Medina Rodrigues), Francis Ponge (by Marcelo Coelho), Shakespeare (by Carlos Antônio Leite Brandão), Goethe (by Márcio Suzuki), Rimbaud (by Marcelin Pleynet), Lucrécio (by Francis Wolff), Dante (by Newton Bignotto) and Camões (by João Adolfo Hansen).