O poeta iniciado, a via-crúcis e o caminho do leite:

rito de passagem e sacrifício em Evocações, de Cruz e Sousa

Abstract

In the work Evocações, the symbolist poet Cruz e Sousa employs the religious figure of the initiated and the ritual notion of sacrifice to narrate the journey of the Black poet’s soul through an artistic Via Crucis in search of immortality and intellectual acknowledgement. As an alchemist-poet, someone able to transfigure himself, he stages a conflicted attempt at redemption, in which he tries to break with his first nature, to be reborn through art. In this process, the poet sets his hopes on the re-foundation of the self in the upper unity of a truer and deeper self, able to reconcile appearance and essence. His process of sacrifice and rebirth is built in the relationship of approximation and distancing with the myth of the Twelve labors of Hercules, the Christ's calvary and the nineteenth-century tradition of secular creator, in dialogue with L'Ève future and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.