The Poetic Prism: personification of nature and vegetalization of humans in the poetry of walt whitman and Eugénio de Andrade

• Autor(a) principal: Mancelos, João de
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/4259
• topic: Walt Whitman; Eugénio de Andrade; Vegetalization; Personification

In the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and of his Portuguese belated disciple, Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005), elements of nature are frequently personified or occupy the center of delicate and inspired metaphors. In the verses of the Brooklyn poet, the ocean becomes “a fierce old mother”; earth reveals itself as a “voluptuous lover”; islands are compared to human breasts, etc. Similarly, in the poetry of Eugénio, certain elements of the landscape resonate with an erotic tonality: the archetypical Mother Earth is pregnant with “fruits and bodies”; fountains are the mouth of the soil, horses become rough lovers, like ancient fauns. While nature is personified, humans are seen as possessing characteristics belonging to the vegetal world. In the American bard’s poetry, chest hair is compared to grass; strong arms are “branches of live oak”; and, not surprisingly, Whitman advises: “Grow as the flower grows, unconsciously, but eagerly anxious to open its soul to the air”. In Eugénio’s oeuvre, lovers are frequently compared to penetrable forests; hands are “open flowers”; mouths are roses; children are associated with blackberries and other woody plants, symbols of renewal; and the poet confesses he wants to “become, one day, a tree”. It is of little wonder that humans are “vegetalized”, since both Andrade and Whitman share a telluric love and a strong belief in the unity of humans and the cosmos. In this context, Whitman attempts to read nature, “the substantial words [that] are in the ground and sea” and, following his example, Andrade tries to decode the language of the open landscape of Beira Baixa, where he spent his childhood, incorporating flora and fauna, rivers and fountains, sunlight and shadows, into his verses, charging these elements with symbolic and mythic meanings. In this paper, my goal is to prove that in Whitman and Andrade’s poetic prism, nature becomes not what is outside the realm of culture, but what constructs our humanity, and ultimately, the strength that pervades and eternalizes poetry. In order to accomplish my objective, I resort to examples extracted from poems of both writers and to the work of specialists in the areas of literature, archetypical theory and eco-criticism.