Augusto dos Anjos


Augusto de Carvalho Rodrigues dos Anjos was a Brazilian poet and professor. His poems speak mostly of sickness and death, and are considered the forerunners of Modernism in Brazil.
He is the patron of the first chair of the Paraiban Academy of Letters.

Biography

Augusto dos Anjos was born in 1884, in an engenho named Pau d'Arco, at the city of Cruz do Espírito Santo, in the Brazilian state of Paraíba. He was initially homeschooled by his father, until he was admitted at the Lyceu Paraibano, where he would become a teacher in 1908. Augusto wrote poems since he was 7 years old.
In 1903 he was admitted at Law course at the Faculdade de Direito do Recife, graduating in 1907. In 1910 he married Ester Fialho.
Starting a career as a magistrate, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he served as teacher for many educational institutions and started to publish his poems in periodicals and newspapers. In 1912 he published his first and only poetry book, Eu, that received mixed reviews by the time it was published.
As he was serving as a headmaster at a school in the city of Leopoldina, Minas Gerais, he died on November 12, 1914, a victim of pneumonia.

Work

Augusto dos Anjos published only one book during his lifetime, named Eu. The themes of its poems, that are impregnated with a heavily scatological medical, scientific and philosophical vocabulary, are mostly sickness, death, heavy morbidity and pessimism.
Literary critics are not sure to which literary movement Augusto dos Anjos belong: some say he was a Symbolist and some say he was a Parnassian, although Ferreira Gullar classifies him as being a Pre-Modernist.

Trivia