Jorge de Lima - Biography

Biography

He was the son of a wealthy merchant and moved to Maceió in 1902, with his mother and siblings. In 1909 he moved to Salvador, where he began studying medicine. Completed the course in Rio de Janeiro in 1914, but was designed as a poet to his name. That same year he published the first book, Alexandrine XIV.

He returned to Maceió in 1915 where he devoted himself to medicine, and literature and politics. When he moved to Alagoas to Rio in 1930 set up an office in Cinelandia, also turned to studio painting and meeting point for intellectuals. There was meeting people like Murilo Mendes, Graciliano Ramos and Jose Lins do Rego. In this period he published about ten books, five of poetry. Also served as state representative from 1918 to 1922. With the Revolution of 1930 was brought to settle down permanently in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1939 he devoted himself also to the arts, participating in some exhibitions. In 1952, he published his most important book, the epic Invention of Orpheus. In 1953, months before he died, he recorded poems for the Archive of the Spoken Word Library of Congress in Washington, the United States of America.

Between 1937 and 1945 had its application to the Brazilian Academy of Letters refused six times. For Ivan Junqueira, the Academy has committed an unforgivable injustice to the author, whose literary work was exceptionally well received by critics and public. The scholar does not believe that the poet was carried forward to the edge of the literature of his time and he says, when referring to the greatest poem of the author - Invention of Orpheus, "... even today, more junk spent 50 years of its publication, there is no Brazilian poet that he did not remember. "

The writings of Jorge de Lima are home to an enormous ability to read (a harmony between tradition and new, the vulgar and the sublime, the regional and universal) reflect a constantly changing artist, who has experienced many styles as Parnassian, oo regional Baroque the religious. In its multiplicity, Jorge de Lima belongs to all times, even if reporting to a theme or a specific situation, touching social injustices that have changed little since the dawn of civilization and writing about the big questions of us all, "... human misery, trying to overcome our limitations and our bonds." says the poet and journalist Claufe Rodrigues, voracious reader of Jorge de Lima.

Italo Moriconi, poet and professor of Brazilian literature at UERJ, author, among other things, how and why to read the poetry of the twentieth century Brazil, to analyze the work of Jorge de Lima (unlike Ivan Junqueira as the question of the poet does not have achieved fame because of his work is, in part, often hermetic and committed to Catholicism), does not believe in the hypothesis that the religious issue has hampered the career of the poet: "As a religious poet Jorge de Lima has never produced anything the quality of Murilo Mendes in "Poetry freedom." The place comes from the canonical Lima sonnets, the first of its modernist poetry, and especially Invention of Orpheus. ".

Moriconi said that most teachers do not know letters or Murilo Mendes and Jorge de Lima and even touches a key to the poor visibility of the poet: "... as a poet as complex lead to a core curriculum for graduation?" (...) Who knows, even love them, as is my case, one of those reluctant to replace these two by four. ", referring to the poet Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário Quintana and João Cabral de Melo Neto.