Manoel de Barros e Lobivar Matos no Modernismo do Mato Grosso

The aim of this text is to study the relationship between Manoel de Barros and Lobivar Matos, two poets based in Rio de Janeiro, and the modernist group in their home state of Mato Grosso in the 1930s. Studying the trajectory of Modernism in Mato Grosso, we return to literary historiography in the state and, to this end, we rely on local authors going through the contributions of Rubens Mendonça in História da Literatura mato-grossense (2015), Poetas Borôros (1942) and the contribution of Hilda Dutra Magalhães, História da Literatura de Mato Grosso: século XX (2017); and those of Marinei Almeida in Revistas e Jornais: Um Estudo do Modernismo em Mato Grosso (2012). Understanding the relationship between Barros, Matos and the modernist movement in Mato Grosso is important in order to point out the characteristics that make up the local nuances of the modernist movement in Mato Grosso. To this end, we rely on the idea of group brought to light by Leandro Pasini in Prismas Modernistas: a lógica de Grupos e o Modernismo Brasileiro (2022). By analyzing the two authors and some of their poems, based on the bibliography cited above, we can see that, unlike the relationship between groups and authors, in the case of Barros and Matos, in Mato Grosso, these authors followed a different path from what happened in São Paulo, where the groups were established concomitantly with the authors in the search for a modernista esthetic. In Mato Grosso, this movement happened in the following manner: both Barros and Matos created their works within the modernist aesthetic before the consolidation of the groups, because the latter did not consolidate the modernist aesthetic in the 1930s, a periodin which Matos and Barros were already producing their works in the modernist aesthetic.