Poetry and Thought in the Writings of Euclides da Cunha

The article aims to examine the poetry of thought of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), highlighting in his peculiar language of a poet-engineer the alliance between science and art, which is of great significance in his aesthetic project as speech and action and, consequently, as a political act. It seeks to defend, in this sense, the shared place located in the writings of Euclides between dream and thought, feeling and reason, poetry and science, considering the reflection as a constitutive element of his work, so as understood by German Romantics, with the meaning of deep inquiry of the self, through the enhancement of relationship between reason and feeling. It takes as a theoretical-philosophical support the concept of romantic irony, according to Friedrich Schlegel, in line with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind understands as one of basic spiritual activities: the act of thinking. This should highlight the aesthetic singularity and the importance of one of the greatest Brazilian intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and point to the significance that his vast work has had for the formation and construction of the complex Brazilian literary development, especially in regard to the discussions about the links between literature and society