A Meditação de Gonçalves Dias. A natureza dos males brasileiros

Abstract

This article makes a critical reading of Meditação, the work in poetic prose by Maranhão-born poet Gonçalves Dias, published piecemeal in the magazine O Guanabara in the early 1850s. Meditação was relegated by the critics, who concentrated on Gonçalves Dias' poetic production and, to a lesser extent, on his ethnographic production. It is a text in which the author is eloquently critical, in a counter-ideological movement remarkable at the time.