Inventors and masters: João Vário and Arménio Vieira

Abstract

João Vário and Arménio Vieira are today´s most influential Cape Verde­an poets. During the first years after Independency Vário publishes in the weekly Voz di Povo some excerpts of the “Epistles to my brother António”, in which he demands the creation of a more complex, knowledgeable and universal poetry than the one the new generations had inherited from Cla­ridade. Concomitantly, he requests the appearance of “lucid, wise, profes­sional” literary critics in Cape Verde. Arménio Vieira, who coordinated the cultural pages of Voz di Povo at the time, comments Vário´s most con­troversial theses, and analyses an excerpt of the later Exemplo Próprio. The invention of Silvenius, the libertarian alter-ego of Vieira, endorses the final overcoming of Claridade’s aesthetic and the establishment of a new poetic paradigm of cosmopolitan nature.