Auta de Souza (12 September 1876 — 7 February 1901) was a Brazilian poet. She wrote

Romantic Romantic may refer to: Genres and eras * The Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries ** Romantic music, of that era ** Romantic poetry, of that era ** Romanticism in science, of that e ...

poems, with some

Symbolistic Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...

influence. Souza published only one book in her lifetime, ''Horto''. Folklorist

Luís da Câmara Cascudo Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish language, Spanish form of the originally Germanic language, Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese language, Portuguese and ...

deemed her as "the greatest mystical poet in Brazil".

Life

Souza was born in

Macaíba Macaíba is a municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Norte in the Northeast region of Brazil. Climate Macaíba has a rather dry tropical savanna climate (Köppen ''As'') with like most of the ''Nordeste'' coast a strong dry season from Septemb ...

, daughter of Elói Castriciano de Souza and Henriqueta Leopoldina Rodrigues. She became an orphan when she was three, with her mother's death by tuberculosis; her father died of the same disease the next year. Souza was then raised by her maternal grandmother in Recife, where she took particular classes. When she was eleven, she was enrolled at the Colégio São Vicente de Paula, a Catholic school run by Vicentin nuns. Souza left school when she was fourteen because of a tuberculosis diagnostic, but then she became an autodidact. At eighteen, she began to collaborate with the magazine ''Oasis'', and at twenty wrote for ''A República'', a larger circulation newspaper which gave her visibility to other regions' press. Her poems were published in Rio de Janeiro newspaper ''O Paiz''. The following year she would write assiduously for Natal newspaper ''A Tribuna'', and her verses were published together with several writers from Brazil northeast. Between 1899 and 1900, she signed his poems under the pseudonyms "Ida Salúcio" and "Hilário das Neves". Several of her poems were adapted as lyrics for

modinha Modinha is the affectionate (grammatically called 'diminutive') form of the Portuguese noun "moda", meaning "fashion". The word "moda" is also used in Portugal, today, generally referring to traditional regional songs. In Portugal, "modinha" was, fr ...

s - popular songforms of nineteenth century Brazil. In 1900 she published her only book, ''Horto'', prefaced by Olavo Bilac.

Death

Auta de Souza died on 7 February 1901, in Natal, of tuberculosis. She was buried at Cemitério do Alecrim, but in 1904 her remains were moved to the family grave, at the church of Our Lady of Conception, in her birth city, Macaíba.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Souza, Auta de 20th-century deaths from tuberculosis 1901 deaths 1876 births 19th-century Brazilian poets People from Rio Grande do Norte Romantic poets 19th-century Brazilian women writers Brazilian women poets Tuberculosis deaths in Rio Grande do Norte