Landscape, emplacement, and diction in the poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto

Abstract

This article analyzes the poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto through the notion of the literary landscape, understood as an aesthetic and cultural category constituted through the mediation between space, perception, and diction. The study focuses on the productive tension between two fundamental geographies in the poet’s work: Pernambuco and Andalusia, territories that function not merely as spatial references but as symbolic matrices shaping his ethics of form and his conception of poetic language. Drawing on theoretical contributions by Alain Roger, Michel Collot, Augustin Berque, among others, and centrally on Manuel Ángel Vázquez Medel’s Theory of Emplacement, the article examines how landscape actively intervenes in the configuration of poetic subjectivity and in Cabral’s diction. It demonstrates that the Northeastern Brazilian landscape—marked by aridity, violence, and deprivation—is translated into a dry, masculine, and anti-rhetorical diction, whereas the Andalusian landscape is figured as feminine, welcoming, and harmonious, associated with measure, clarity, and formal restraint. Through the analysis of key poems, the study shows that these geographies do not operate in isolation but in constant friction and superposition, generating a poetics of contrast that transforms space into a structuring principle of poetic thought. In this way, landscape emerges as a critical axis for understanding João Cabral de Melo Neto’s work and his singular conception of poetry as an exercise in rigor, perception, and circumstance.