ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyze the presence of the animal in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade from a transdisciplinary perspective. My purpose is to discuss the ways in which the poet deals with paradoxical relations between human and nonhuman beings, as well as with the matter of animal subjectivity. First, I focus on poems dealing with livestock, particularly oxen, as those are central to the poet’s writings. Given that Drummond lived in the Minas Gerais countryside, where his father was a farmer, he never stopped evoking the countryside of his childhood and describing the contradictions in that time’s rural communities where humans, animals, and plants mingled fluidly in a complex exchange of interspecies interests, experiences, and affections. Afterward, I address some ecological aspects of Drummond’s oeuvre, demonstrating his concern with environmental devastation and the extinction of many animal species.
