Mystical perspective of Brazilian modernism: the poets and poems that made the magazine Festa

Abstract

This article is the final product of the research project "Modernismo e Mística" (Modernism and Mysticism) (2022/2023), which investigated the case of the thought and art monthly Festa. Headed by Tasso da Silveira and Andrade Muricy, Festa emerged amid an atmosphere of heated discussions and intense debates about modern art in Brazil.  The intellectuals who made up the Festa magazine dismissed the modern art as the primitivism of the Andrades (Mário and Oswald) and the dynamist futurism of Graça Aranha. As a result, in 1927, the Festa art and thought monthly was created, whose artistic link was based primarily on the ideal of spiritualist universality, which reinitiated Brazilian thought and art in a close link with the mystical-philosophical, which led to a promise of renewal and splendor of tradition. Given its dissonant philosophy, the magazine was for a long time placed on the less noisy side of Brazilian modernism, which led to a lack of attention from specialized critics. This article aims to reconfigure this picture by looking at the Festa poets and their respective poems, thus showing what Festa's spiritualist modernism was. Furthermore, the article as a whole allows us to conceive the importance of this group for Brazilian literature. In view of this, we entered into a dialog with certain theorists, such as Gilberto Teles (2012), Alfredo Bosi (2006), Eugênio Péricles (1979) and Neusa Simões (1971), in order to gain a panoramic understanding of Brazilian modernism. It was also essential to read the doctrinal texts published in the monthly itself in order to get a sense of the spiritualist modernism presented by the intellectuals and, above all, by the Festa poets. For all these reasons, we are trying to shine a light on this Festa, which critics have allowed to be extinguished for too long.