Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga
Template:Short description Template:Infobox poet
Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga (1749–1814) was a Brazilian poet. He had a life-long commitment to life-long learning and promoting civic values and educational reforms.[1] Silva Alvarenga edited one of the first newspapers in Brazil, O Patriota.[2]
Biography
Early Life
Silva Alvarenga was born out of wedlock in Ouro Preto and was biracial.[1] His mother was African and his father an "indigent white musician."[1] He was raised in Minas Gerais.[2]
Education
In the early 1770s, he studied in Rio de Janeiro.[3] Silva Alvarenga was able to attend the University of Coimbra in Portugal in 1776[1] where he studied law.[3] His father's friends encouraged his poetry and musical talents.[1] After studying in Portugal, he moved back to Brazil, where he was part of the Ouro Preto Arcady.[2] In 1782, he moved to Rio de Janeiro where he taught rhetoric and poetics[2] in the position of Royal Professor.[4]
Career
He became a founding member of the Sociedade Literária do Rio de Janeiro (Literary Society in Rio de Janeiro) in 1786.[3][5] The society discussed issues ranging from the French Revolution to religion, where some members challenged religious dogma and claimed that miracles did not exist.[4] Because the society was considered "subversive" he was imprisoned from 1794 to 1797.[2] He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1814.[3]
Poetry
Silva Alvarenga's poetry follows European Neoclassical aesthetics of the eighteenth century[1] and is considered an Arcadian poet.[6] His work is compared to Tomás António Gonzaga and Cláudio Manuel da Costa.[6] Silva Alvarenga, along with other Brazilian Arcadians, have been credited with planting "the roots of a literary culture in a systematic sense" in Brazil.[2]
He was unique among contemporary Brazilian poets in using Brazil's own natural landscape in his work.[1] He rarely included Africans in his own poetry and when he did, his depictions were considered negative by today's standards.[6] Despite his personal background as a person of color, Silva Alvarenga, like many in his time, believed that black people were not "suitable subjects for poetry."[7]
O Desetor das Letras is a satire based on university reforms of 1772.[3]
His series of work, Glaura: poemas eroticos was originally published in Lisbon.[2] Many of the poems are very much part of the pastoral Arcady tradition, however, literary critics have identified "elements which foreshadow Brazilian Romanticism."[2]
- O Desertor das Letras (1774) - heroic-comic poem
- Glaura (1799) – erotic poems
References
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