Cassiano Ricardo

Cassiano Ricardo (born July 26, 1895, São José dos Campos, Braz.—died Jan. 14, 1974, Rio de Janeiro) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and journalist, one of the most versatile 20th-century Brazilian poets. During his long life he participated in every literary movement from Parnassianism through Modernism to the Concretism and Praxis Poetry of the 1960s.

Ricardo’s poetic production covers the period 1915–71. He was a prime mover during the early 1920s in the “Anta” subgroup of literary Modernism, which urged a nationalistic rediscovery of the land and its indigenous folkloric traditions. Martim Cererê (1928), perhaps his best-known collection of poems, dates from this period. From nationalism, Ricardo evolved toward the compassionate, universal, “post-atomic” worldview evident in Jeremias sem-chorar (1964; “Tearless Jeremiah”) and other collections of the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote extensively in the area of literary theory and exercised a marked influence on every generation of young poets through the early 1970s.