The poetic art as dance: the image of female dancer in Mallarme’s texts and in Cabral’s poems

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, dance and music required a degree of autonomy from other arts, especially for the centrality that the literary writer, as critic or as a composer of music or of opera librettos, exerted. The aim of this paper is to study the thematic relation between a French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, and the Brazilian poet, João Cabral de Melo Neto, concerning their admiration for the dance. Mallarmé sets it as a corporeal sign that united the traces of material beauty with poetic expression. In Cabral’s poetry, this relation is expressed in A bailarina and Estudos para uma bailadora anduluza.