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The cruelest harvest: Virgilian agricultural pessimism in the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period


 Classical imagery and mythological narratives provided ready literary analogues for framing European expansion into the New World in the colonial and early modern periods. This article examines the manipulation of classical images of agricultural fecundity and Virgilian pessimism in select works of two Brazilian poets working in the neoclassical tradition during the colonial period, José Basílio da Gama (1740–95) and Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–93), by which both poets advance a critique of Iberian expansion into Latin America. I argue that both poets, writing in dialogue with one another, activate an especially Virgilian agricultural imagery that sets war in contradiction to agricultural production in a post-colonial critique of European imperialist expansion into Brazil. The poetry of these figures exhibits a remarkable reversal of sympathies that distinguishes South American treatment of ancient material from that of European receptions that aligned imperial Europe with the Roman empire and its traditional heroes, a comparison established in order to justify colonialist expansion into the New World.