The wonderful in Manuel Botelho de Oliveira’s poetry

Abstract

This text explains how the poetry of Luzo-Brazilian Manuel Botelho de Oliveira (Bahia, 1636-1711) aims to build the wonderful especially through the consonances that provokes surprise, in a poetry grounded in analogies with the “music”, the “chant”, the “verse”, the “lyrical”, the “rhythm”, the “sweetness” - concepts present in rhetorical, poetic and philosophical treatises of the Antiquity, and that here become center stage of this poetic, far removed from Aristotle. It highlights how, unlike the ingenious concept, the efficient cause of the acute poetry, the poet emulator of Marino favors sonority in the Lira Sacra and in the Música do Parnaso, his poem book. The musical elements turn admirabile what the poems says, playing finezas (niceties) or singable manners of the plectro doce e fino (plectrum sweet and gentle).