There was never in Brazilian literature a more vivid expression of sadism nor of pessimistic introspection than the poems of Augusto dos Anjos. He took a morbid delight, a strange voluptuousness in analyzing his impression of physical decay; a world of skulls and worm-eaten bodies gnawed constantly at him.

He was that "avis rara" in Brazil: a poet who annexed philosophical problems to his poetry. He was deeply affected by the expansion of mechanistic monism (Haeckel, Buchner and Company) and his philosophy was that of a sectarian. His taste for introspection was thus developed within the narrow limits set by his scientific ideas and prejudices.

And yet his mind seemed to possess those exquisitely subtle tentacles that reach something beyond a purely sensuous world. There was in him a repressed hunger for the spiritual, a current of spiritual fire that only lacked the stimulus to start flowing. One wonders in that direction the current would finally flow: probably in the direction of the Roman Catholic Church. For as Huysmans very aptly points out, mysticism and sadism are "ces deux fossés de la religion catholique qui arrivent à se joindre".

Augusto dos Anjos was one of those men in whom brain develops at the cost of body. He fitted into Hearn’s definition of a genius. He was one "in whom the nervous system had a delicacy and a sensitiveness far beyond the average person".

He was abnormally sensitive. He was all aches, pains, derangements. His was a world seen, felt, experienced and voluptuously analyzed through senses and organs functioning abnormally. There was nothing in him of Stevenson’s heroism as consumption luxuriously gnawed at his weak lungs. Augusto dos Anjos offered no mental battle against his derangements and diseases. He felt himself doomed and damned in the face of his infirmities. No more radiant example could be found than his for Spinoza’s theory that one’s organs, viscera and tissues shape one’s ego to their own likeness.

Augusto dos Anjos’ only volume of poems is entitled "Eu"; and his ego was little more than a sort of sum total of impressions and ideas obtained through diseased organs - through a diseased nervous system. Sience and a mechanistic conception of the world made him think of his lot as an entirely hopeless one. He was like that man whom G.K. Chesterton could not understand: a man to whom his human lot was made more hopeless by science because science taught him the names of all the worms who eat him or the names of all the parts of him that they eat.

Augusto dos Anjos’ morbidity distorted everything he wrote. His creative virsion imposes upon our eyes and upon our olfactory sense unforgettable pictures of physical decay. Unforgettable because they are distorted. There was something in Augusto dos Anjos of a modern Expressionistic German painter.

He was a pictorial rather than a musical poet. Unlike most of the Latin American poets he had not the obsession of sweet cadence and soft vowels. He limited himself to conventional forms but a sort of piquant, bitter, wild juice flows through his rhythms. In many of his verses the clash of sharp, astringent sounds, and even of troublesome consonants is neither avoied nor suavely disguised. Through them he achieves at times some very striking effects.

The emotions that one finds in dos Anjos’ poems are emotions of a philosophical kind. The Brazilian poet made a serious effort to think.

In Brazilian the effort to think is not made without considerable pain and even sacrifice. It is an unnatural effort.

The first law of mental hygiene for the tropics is to avoid that effort. Thinking in Brazil is a sort of intellectual masturbation. It is a revolt against the spirit of tropic nature and the rhythm of creole life. Augusto dos Anjos detached himself from both.

Lacfadio Hearn once wrote a beautiful story about the spirit of tropic nature. I refer to "Pa Combiné". It is the strange story of a negro prostitute.

"Do not think, dear," is the warning of the languid prostitute to a convalescent European in the French West Indies. And in the colored girl’s voluptuousness and savage grace, the European beheld "a something imaged, not of herself, no of the moment only - something weirdly sensuous, the spirit of tropic nature made golden flesh and murmuring to each lured wanderer: ‘If thou wouldst love me, do not think!’ ".

Augusto dos Anjos did not love tropic nature; he sinfully detached himself from it. Sinfully? Heroically, perhaps. It was sinful according to those who reduce life to a mere natural behaviour.

Dos Anjos grew up in a sugar cane plantation in tropical Parahyba. He writes of it as a place of dread and loneliness. As a boy he must have heard the spirit of tropic nature murmuring to him as he walked through the thick, turbid masses of vegetation in Pau d’Arco: "if thou wouldst love me, do not think, dear!".

But the boy only developed a love for an old tamarind tree near the plantation house. There he used to sit for hours in a kind of ecstasy.

He wrote a poem on that old tamarind tree. It is a poem full of the mystical premonition of his early death. Though it savours of a poignant realism of locality it is not a pantheistic poem. His attachment for this particular tree was rather a phenomenon of empathy than a pantheistic enthusiasm. For Augusto dos Anjos nothing really existed outside of himself. There was only his ego and its shadow - an immense shadow.

No love for tropic nature is shown in dos Anjos’ poems. He was not interested in Brazilian nature. Its offensive vitality did not appeal in the least to one who was so keenly sensitive to material impressions of decay and languor. He got no thrill, no frisson from Brazilian nature. He remained strangely aloof to it. His attitude towards the luring charms of the tropics was that of an eunuch towards the luring charms of a lustful woman.

But it was not from tropic nature only that Augusto detached himself: he also detached himself from the rhythm of creole life, from its ease and ordinary amenities. Even in more sophisticated centers than Parahyba he would have been the same exotic flower - the same strange flower of morbidezza.

He was extremely sensitive to common subordidness. He saw sordidness everywhere. The world of sex was a sordid world for him: because of sex he could see no sanctity in family relations.

Sex appears in his poems alway surrounded by evil shadows of guilt. He tasted love and found in this supreme manifestation of vitality a bitter, sharp, troublesome tang of poison. He says in one of his poems that love is like a bitter sugar cane that one takes for a sweet and ripe one until he tastes it and is disapointed. And yet salacious erotic scenes appealed to his sadism.

Unlike Bilac, whom the American critic Dr. Isaac Goldberg has so piquantly discribed as "a faun in frock coat, sporting with naiads in silk *, Augusto dos Anjos was rather the voluptuary of decay and languor than of young and beautiful bodies in rapture.

Psychologists and psychiatrists would luxuriate in Augusto dos Anjos’ case. Perhaps the most modern of them would label it a case of inferiority complex. They would say that the Brazilian poet’s loud publicity of his own pains and perversions was that bizarre neurotic activity where he found a compensation for his short-comings in life.

Augusto dos Anjos wrote freely of morbid subjects. Unlike Strindberg he wrote of them without any intention of reforming or moralizing.

He wrote more freely than Poe. His poem "The God Worm" is much stronger in its olfactory sadism than Poe’s "The Conqueror Worm". And Poe would never have written these horrid words: "There is more philosophy in a consumptive’s spit than in the whole moral of Christianity".

Augusto dos Anjos wrote them. He wrote them in a book like that of Baudelaire of which Barbey so poignantly said: "Après un tel livre, il ne reste plus à l’auteur qu’a choisir entre la bouche d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix".

An absorbing disease prevented Augusto dos Anjos from taking either of the two supreme solutions: a pistol or the crucifix. He became too sick, too miserably depressed too apathetic for either a violent suicide or a radical conversion. But one can say that his fatal illness - he died at the age of thirty - was both a gradual suicide and a gradual conversion.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Augusto dos Anjos: poet of voluptuous pessimism. The Stratford Monthly. Boston, v. 2, n. 3, p. 273-276, 1924.