Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade

Conclusion: A Poetics of Equilibrium and the Avant-Garde Paradox

178 Creo que todos los poetas de todos los tiempos han afirmado lo mismo: el deseo es un testimonio de nuestra condición desgarrada; asimismo, es una tentativa por recobrar nuestra mitad perdida.Y el amor, como la imagen poética, es un instante de reconciliación de los contrarios. Octavio Paz El arco y la lira From Aristotle to Bloom, the history of poetics presents dominant discursive functions in both description and prescription. While a poetics necessarily reflects, to some extent, the norms that are already accepted or in the process of formalization at the time, it also endeavors, in the very act of explicating these norms, to promote them as a timeless, universal interpretation of poetry that can guide writers of the present and future. Poetic history is therefore a history of dialogue, as each poetics alternately denies or expands (or both) the arguments of the previous ones. The descriptive nature of poetics, related to the poetry of the moment, perhaps receives more attention, hence Mário’s query: “Onde nunca jamais se viu uma estética preceder as obras de arte que ela justificará?” (OI 246); a poetics is inevitably derivative. Yet there exists, complementarily, the idealized outlook that sanctifies, to varying degrees of intent , the poetics as a theory of Poetry (not just the poetry of a period or movement) destined to provide a lasting model, even if that model serves only as a point of departure for differing poetics. The “intra-poetic relationships” that articulate Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence can thus be expanded into intra-poetics relationships. The degree of difference resides in the fact Conclusion A Poetics of Equilibrium and the Avant-Garde Paradox 179 A Poetics of Equilibrium that a poetics, essentially a broad act of meta-poetry, encompasses more than the aim of most individual poems, though those poems may themselves be expressions or examples of a certain poetics. I identify five processes that comprise these functions of description and prescription in poetics: (1) differentiation, (2) exempli fication, (3) establishment, (4) idealization, and (5) prophecy. The first two processes pertain strictly to the function of description, while the last two adhere to the function of prescription. The middle process, establishment, acts within both functions and links the other four processes. By way of conclusion, I incorporate here the above system to comparatively analyze—in a brief recapitulation—the main thematic and formal characteristics of Huidobro’s and Mário’s poetics, and to contrast the temporal concerns of the avant-garde, as expressed by some of its most important theorists, with the universal sense of poetry in equilibrium. • Poetics: Description Differentiation, the first process of description, revokes previous poetic ideals, thereby setting the stage for the establishment of new ones. In The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli shows that, even in this act of rupture, an avant-garde poetics can be surprisingly traditional: “Like any artistic tradition , however antitraditional it may be, the avant-garde also has its conventions [that], in a conscious or unconscious way, are directly and rigidly determined by an inverse relation to traditional conventions” (56). For example, both Huidobro and Mário condemn traditional mimesis—“non serviam” (715), “fotografia colorida” (PC 65). Both poets, after having begun their published careers with poetry collections imitating the previous styles of Hispanic modernismo and Brazilian parnasianismo (Ecos del Alma and Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema, respectively), reverse themselves and finally renounce their predecessors. Mário censures restrictive rhymes and rhythms (“um leito de Procusto” [PC 66]) and is joined by Huidobro in rebuking the limitation of poetic themes (“EL GRAN PELIGRO DEL POEMA ES LO POÉTICO” [752]) as unfeasible in the increasingly industrialized and interconnected modern world. 180 Conclusion The act of differentiation consists not only of the abolishment of traditional prosodic norms but also of the rejection of other contemporary poetics. In the vanguard contest for originality , such differentiation assumes a special intensity for both authors. To prove himself in Paris and assert his original ideas, Huidobro reacts strongly against the surrealists by balancing out their exaltation of the unconscious—“Yo también proclamo el inconsciente, pero el inconsciente de los hombres conscientes ” (748)—and by denouncing a period in his own artistic past in which he experimented with the unconscious. Both he and Mário distance themselves from Marinetti by debunking the futurist...