New Currents in Brazilian Poetry--Gonçalves de Magalhães, Gonçalves Dias, Alvarez de Azevedo, Castro Alves--Lesser Figures--Beginnings of the Brazilian Novel--Manoel de Macedo, José de Alencar, Taunay and Others--The Theatre. I Though usually associated with French literature, the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, like that later neo-romanticism which nurtured the Symbolist and the Decadent schools of the second half, came originally from Germany, and was in essence a philosophy of self-liberation.[1] In Brazil it is thus in part applied suggestion rather than spontaneous creation. But national creative production thrives on cross-fertilization and self-made literatures are as unthinkable as self-made men. There is marked difference between mere imitation and subjection to valid influence, and few literary phenomena in the history of the new-world literature, north or south of Panama, attest the truth of this better than Brazil’s period of Romanticism; this is the richest--if not the most refined--of its intellectual epochs. Brazilian culture is thrown open to the currents of European thought, as its ports with the advent of João VI had been thrown open to European commerce, and receives from romanticism, in the words of Wolf, the “ideal consecration” of its nativism. And herein, of course, lies the great distinction between the mere nativism which is so easily taken for a national note, and that nationalism which adds to the exaltation of the milieu the spiritual consciousness of unity and independence. A national literature, in the fuller sense, is now possible because it is the expression not solely of an aspiration but of partial accomplishment, with a historic background in fact. Poetry becomes more varied; the novel takes more definite form; genuine beginnings are made in the theatre, though, despite valiant attempts to prove the contrary, the Brazilian stage is the least of its glories. Carvalho, selecting the four representative poets of the period, has characterized each by the trait most prominent in his work. Thus Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811-1882) stands for the religious phase of Brazilian romanticism; Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864) for the naturistic; Alvarez de Azevedo (1831-1852) for the poetry of doubt, and Castro Alves (1847) for the muse of social reclamation, particularly the abolition of black slavery. This group is but a solo quartet in a veritable chorus of singers that provides a variegated setting. The individual songs resound now more clearly, like so many strains in the polyphonic hymn of national liberation. The salient four are by no means restricted to the style of verse indicated by their classification, but such a grouping helps to emphasize the main currents of the new poetry. II