THE MEETING OF WATERS AND VERSES: THE POEM AS REPORT OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

Abstract

Poetic texts can express the cultural symbolic value of a specific landscape and simultaneously narrate the human action that contributes to their transform. This article analyzed the poems A meditação sobre o Tietê, written by Mário de Andrade, and Adeus a Sete Quedas by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. These texts describe some attributes that demonstrate the cultural significance of Tietê River, and Sete Quedas Falls. Besides, it verified the historic context about environmental degradation and submersion, in the case of Sete Quedas Falls, of those landscapes and natural heritages. The search used some verses that describe the nature cultural value and environmental degradation of the landscapes, which were correlated to historical, economic, political and social contexts, involved in the dilapidation of those potential cultural objects. Cartographic and iconographic documents illustrate the symbolic content of the landscapes. The poems can be considered as materials that report the rupture of the cultural symbolic meaning of landscape elements.