Homage Versus Parody: A Reading of Mário Cesariny's Poem "A Edgar Allan Poe"

Reading Notes

Abstract

Mário Cesariny's poem that the present study proposes to analyze is entitled "A Edgar Allan Poe" (Pena Capital, 1957) and can be situated in the historicalliterary period of surrealism. In a permanent oscillation between the attraction of Poe's imaginary, full of details close to surrealist taste, and the repulsion by a universe that gives primacy to deductive reasoning and the history constructed using logic – see, for example, the central assumptions of the essay The Philosophy of Composition - Cesariny writes a poem that retrieves phrases, characters and tales from the north-american writer. Therefore, we will seek to demonstrate, using the intertextual and hypertextual mechanisms that are drawn in the poem, the way this text conceives, paradoxically, a subversive homage and an ironic parody of the Edgar Allan Poe’s literary work. All in all, we concluded that, through the polyphonic convocation of other voices, Cesariny builds a worldview that defies the status quo.