[2][3] He has become something of a national cultural symbol in Brazil, where his widely influential poem "Canção Amiga" ("Friendly Song") has been featured on the 50-cruzado novo bill.

Though his earliest poems are formal and satirical, Drummond quickly adopted the new forms of Brazilian modernism that were evolving in the 1920s, incited by the work of Mário de Andrade (to whom he was not related).

The poem deals with an anti-Faust referred to in the first person, who receives the visit of the aforementioned Machine, which stands for all possible knowledge, and the sum of the answers for all the questions which afflict men; in highly dramatic and baroque versification, the poem develops only for the anonymous subject to decline the offer of endless knowledge and proceed his gloomy path in the solitary road.

It takes the renaissance allegory of the Machine of the World from Portugal's most esteemed poet, Luís de Camões, more precisely, from a canto at the end of his epic masterpiece Os Lusíadas.

That type of poetry has been published in only one book, "Moça deitada na grama" (woman laid down in the grass) with the authorization and actual intervention by his son-in-law.

[citation needed] Drummond is a favorite of American poets, a number of whom, including Mark Strand and Lloyd Schwartz, have translated his work.

But it goes beyond that: "The work of Drummond reaches – as Fernando Pessoa, Jorge de Lima, Murilo Mendes, and Herberto Helder – a coefficient of loneliness that detached from the soil of history, leading the reader to an attitude-free of references, trademarks or ideological or prospective," said Alfredo Bosi (1994).