Sublime landscape and passion: Gonçalves Dias as a critical reader of Turquety

Abstract

Édouard Turquety, a contemporary French poet now largely forgotten, holds a unique distinction as the poet whose verses feature most prominently as epigraphs in Gonçalves Dias’s Primeiros Cantos (1846), a seminal work in Brazilian Romanticism. It is noteworthy, however, that in subsequent works, namely Primeiros Cantos (1848) and Segundos Cantos (1851), Turquety fades into obscurity while other poets, such as Byron, Victor Hugo, and Zorrilla, not only persist as epigraphs but even see an increase in their frequency. This article aims to investigate the conspicuous imbalance, proposing the hypothesis that Gonçalves Dias recognized early on that, despite his initial admiration for Turquety, their poetic conceptions diverged significantly, particularly in their approach to nature. While Turquety, a disciple of Lamartine, depicted nature as an object of contemplation, poems like “O mar” placed pathos and dismountability at the core of nature’s representation, following the pioneering ideas of Edmund Burke on the sublime.