When the City Overflows into Poetry – São Luís through Gonçalves Dias and Ferreira Gullar

Abstract

This article explores a possible connection between literature, memory, and urban space, aiming to identify whether Canção do Exílio (Gonçalves Dias) and an excerpt from Poema Sujo (Ferreira Gullar), which portray the city of São Luís-MA, can be considered representations of the city at specific historical moments. Through this poetic corpus, we examine how the relationships between poetry and city, poet and city, are experienced and expressed, and how these poets externalized the city by transferring it into poetry, transforming it into a reliquary of a given era. To this end, we draw on concepts of space and city in dialogue with Cultural Studies, referencing authors such as Bachelard, Ricoeur, Tuan, Dardel, Brandão, Collot, among others. These reflections guide our reading of the poems that represent São Luís as a space of identity and memory. In Canção do Exílio, Gonçalves Dias attributes an image to the place that has naturally changed over time, arriving at a São Luís that, in Poema Sujo by Ferreira Gullar, becomes a dynamic experience of the subject. This space, once seen as a natural landscape, becomes over time a memorial of values interwoven in a dialectical fabric of past, present, and future.