His full name was Olavo Braz Martins dos Guimarães Bilac; he is one of the most popular poets that Brazil has produced; his surroundings and his person, like the poetry that brought him his fame, were exquisite,--somewhat in the tradition of the French dandies and the Ibero-American versifiers who imitated them--yet in him the note was not overdone. He passes, in the history of the national letters, for one of the Parnassian leaders, yet he is one of their most subjective spirits. Toward the end of his life, as if the feelings that he had sought so long to dominate in his poetry must at last find vent, he became a sort of Socialist apostle, preaching the doctrine of education. “Brazil’s malady,” he averred, “is, above all, illiteracy.” And like so many of his creative compatriots, he set patiently about constructing text-books for children. In his early days he found inspiration in the Romantic Gonçalves Dias and the Parnassian Alberto de Oliveira; very soon, however, he attained to an idiom quite his own which lies somewhat between the manner of these two. “He is the poet of the city,” one critic has written, “as Catullus was of Rome and as Apuleius was of Carthage.” He has been compared, likewise, to Lucian of Samosata. Most of all, however, he is the poet of perfumed passion,--not the heavy, drugged perfumes of D’Annunzio, which weigh down the votaries until they suffer amidst their pleasures, but--and again like some of his Spanish-American brothers in the other nations of the continent--a faun in frock coat, sporting with naiads in silk. Bilac has his ivory tower, but its doors stand ajar to beauty of body and of emotion. His is no withdrawal into the inner temple; his eyes are always peering into the world from which he supposedly stands aloof, and his heart follows them. We are not to look to him, then, for either impersonality or impassivity. Even when he wrote of the Iliad, of Antony, of Carthage, he had his native Brazil in mind, as he revealed in his final poems. “We never really had a literature,” he said shortly before his death. “We have imitations, copies, reflections. Where is the writer that does not recall some foreigner,--where is the school that we can really call our own?… There are, for the rest, explanations of this fact. We are a people in process of formation, in which divers ethnical elements are struggling for supremacy. There can be no original literature until this is formed.…”