Manuel Bandeira

In 1903 his family moved to São Paulo where Bandeira joined the Polytechnical School, with the intention of becoming an architect. He also attended an evening school of arts where he studied drawing and painting taught by the architect Domenico Rossi.
At the end of 1904, he quit his studies after discovering that he had contracted tuberculosis, and he moved back to Rio de Janeiro. He suffered for most of his life from tuberculosis and it was said “his poetry spits blood” however he was also known as humorous poet

His writing came under the influence of Apollinaire, Charles Cros e Mac-Fionna Leod.

In 1912 Bandeira wrote his first “free verse” poetry. A year later, he traveled to Switzerland to have his illness treated at the Clavadel Sanatorium where he met the poet Paul Éluard.

In October of 1914, he returned to Brazil and wrote criticism of music and arts columns for several newspapers. In 1917, he published his first book of poetry entitled "A cinza das horas" (The Ashes of the Hours) a 200 copy [exemplars] edition sponsored by himself. His second book, Carnaval, was published in 1919, drawing the attention of Brazilian Modernists such as Mário de Andrade, who later became his friend.
After the publication of Carnaval, he made his name as a poet of the modernist revolution.

In 1940 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He translated many literary works such as Shakespeare‘s Macbeth, Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale and Fréderic Mistra’s Mireille into Portuguese. In 1960 a collection of his poems, Poèmes was translated and published in France.

In 1964, Charles Frank Publications published A Brief History of Brazilian Literature, containing his poems translated by R. E. Dimmick.

In the afternoon of 13 October 1968 Manuel Bandeira passed away but not before securing a permanent place in the history of Brazilian poetry.

In his lifetime he published well over a dozen books of poetry and at least seven collections of selected poems