Unbelievable

This book I am reading on "o espirito de nacionalidade na critica brasileira" is full of undigested romanticism, statements like "romantic poets entered into the indigenous soul." I am going to read it along side of another book American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present, which, if I remember, puts forward an Emersonian genealogy for American poetry. Both of these books were published in 1968.

One of the epigraphs is:

"A literatura sempre foi a mais eloqüente fisiologia de un povo." [Literature has always been the most eloquent physiology of a people]

This is true, as long as you recognize that the idea of literature and people (in this sense) arise out of nineteenth-century nationalism.