Monumento À Castro Alves - Salvador, Brazil - Dead Poets' Society Memorials on Waymarking.com

The monument is dedicated to Castro Alves, the poet of the slaves. Created in Sao Paulo and shipped to Salvador in 1922, the bronze statue of the poet was installed on June 20, 1923. It rests on a granite column. On one side of the column is an angel in a flight position raising a slave woman, and on the other side is an open book with a sword. At the foot of the statue stands a slave. It is also the poet's tomb, as his remains were transferred there from the cemetery.

Antônio de Castro Alves (born March 14, 1847, Muritiba, Braz.—died July 6, 1871, Salvador) was a Romantic poet whose sympathy for the Brazilian abolitionist cause won him the name “poet of the slaves.”

While still a student Castro Alves produced a play that brought him to the attention of José de Alencar and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian literary leaders. Having studied for the law, he soon became a dominant figure among the Condoreira (Condor) school of poets, likened, for their dedication to lofty causes and for their preference for elevated style, to the highest flying birds in the Americas. His romantic image was heightened by his sense of being foredoomed by a wound incurred in a hunting accident. He lived and wrote at fever pitch while the wound worsened and eventually led to amputation of his foot. Tuberculosis set in, and he died at 24. Espumas flutuantes (1870; “Floating Foam”) contains some of his finest love lyrics. A cachoeira de Paulo Afonso (1876; “The Paulo Afonso Falls”), a fragment of Os escravos, tells the story of a slave girl who is raped by her master’s son. This and Castro Alves’ other abolitionist poems were collected in a posthumous book, Os escravos (1883; “The Slaves”).

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