An uncanny garden

Abstract

This essay focuses on the analysis of Carlos Drummond de Andrade´s “Jardim,” seen as exemplary of a poetics in transit, namely the one in the book Novos poemas (1948). Based on
the Adornian discussion of the relations between artistic form and reality principle, we seek to grasp the way in which History, sedimented in subjectivity – in this case, in dream images
and phantomatic masquerade –, is present in the configuration of the poem. The poem’s imagetic figuration, images of the psyche of a poetic “I” who sees the strange garden and reflects himself in it, leads us to investigate a thematic core in Drummondian poetry,
connected to melancholy, phantasmagoria, mutilation, and dissolution as constitutive processes of this poetic subjectivity.