Poetic phantasmagoria: from gothic sensitivity to modern self-conscious poetry

Abstract

These considerations aim to demonstrate the bonds between the elements of gothic poetry which provide the mystery effect and the procedure of suggestion characteristic of the self-conscious discourse of modern poetry. These investigations take as object the poems Le chambre gothique, of Aloysius Bertrand’s series Gaspard de la nuit (1895) and ‘Os Olhos’, of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Pedra do Sono (1975). The study aims to prove how gothic poetry allows for a suggestive expression that can serve to some imperatives of modern poetry, as the search of poetic image autonomy and the attempt to configure the awareness of the expressive limits of poetry. Between the gothic and the modern poetry, it can be seen the composition of an oblique poetic discourse in which the references remain hidden, obliging the aesthetic fruition of poetry images as autonomous entities. The category here defined as poetic phantasmagoria emerges when such images articulate with the suggestive expression of a system of representation that favors the supernatural, the macabre and the sinister. From the poetic phantasmagoria, at last, it is intended to explore the permanence in modernity of reminiscences of the most extreme expression of the romanticism, which are enclosed by the gothic genre.