[26] On 25 January 1862, shortly after his father's marriage to Maria Ramos Guimarães,[27] and at only fourteen years old, Castro Alves moved to the city of Recife with his older brother,[28] in order to enroll in a preparatory course attached to the Faculty of Law of that capital, with the intention of joining it.

[28] Luís Cornélio dos Santos, another great friend who would accompany him until his death, reported that they then went to live in a remote neighborhood of Recife, on the banks of the Capibaribe, where he often followed him on walks in which he read poems from a notebook that, later, got lost.

[10] But in March he had taken the college entrance exam, failing in geometry: "he had always been interested in mathematics", in the words of Afrânio Peixoto, who, however, justified this failure with the fact that the Chambers closed at the time, thus making it impossible for him to receive the notice to carry out a conditional enrollment, as a listener.

[39] In Recife, Castro Alves stood out for his improvisations and for his demonstrations in the historical moments in which he convulsed public opinion; so in early 1866, on the same street where he lived, he joined Augusto Guimarães, Ruy Barbosa, Plínio de Lima, Regueira Costa and others in founding an abolitionist society.

Black, wavy hair; wide, sonorous voice; confident enunciation, as if pausedly; gesture and word in unfailing harmony, dominating attention and heart, impatience and conscience of the ecstatic auditorium; astonishing success!

[31] Afrânio Peixoto described that moment in 1917: "Finally, on 7 September, Gonzaga takes the stage, with Eugênia in the role of Maria, a memorable literary festival that definitively consecrated Castro Alves, crowned in an open scene, in the delirium of the crowd that carried him in its arms to a feast and then to his house, always amid ovations".

[1] Alencar also presented Castro Alves to Machado de Assis with a letter of recommendation in which he indicated the "Poet of Slaves" with the following words: "Be the Virgil of young Dante, lead him along the pathless paths where one goes to disappointment, indifference and finally glory, which are the three maximum circles of the divine comedy of talent".

[57] The surgery, performed in the first days of June, was reported by the São Paulo newspaper Ypiranga on 21 July; the long convalescence began in which the poet, now wearing a wooden prosthesis, imagined reaching a "new spring".

During the period when he stayed with Luís Cornélio and his wife, his house became the "Petit Salon", frequented by young artists and intellectuals, and he had brief passions like those of Cândida and Laura, who he recalled in the poem "Os Anjos da Meia-Noite" (The Midnight Angels).

[57] Castro Alves' arrival in Salvador, in an account transcribed by Archimimo Ornelas, translated his physical and moral decay: "It was a moving scene when he entered his father's house, being received by his stepmother and the young sisters who adored him.

[24] On 29 January, he left for Bahia's hinterlands one last time, on a boat trip that "split the waves of the Paraguaçu in search of the deep solitude of the deserts, to feed, like Saul, the despair of my spirit, and revive this blood exhausted and impoverished by sadness and suffering", as he recorded in a letter to Luiz Cornélio; He then left, together with his brother-in-law Augusto, for Curralinho, where, according to Archimimo Ornelas, he found himself influenced by the death of Allan Kardec, which occurred at the end of the previous year and which had had great repercussions in those days, and produced verses in which he questioned life after death.

I hate the mausoleum that awaits the dead Like the traveler from that dismal hotel Writer Múcio Teixeira, in his 1896 biography of Castro Alves, recounted his last hint of vanity: "On the eve of the fatal day, after repeated pleas, they gave him a mirror.

[73] His sister Adelaide, who died in Rio de Janeiro on 22 September 1940, was the "faithful caretaker of the poet's memory, preserving his originals, informing about his life", recorded Afrânio Peixoto, concluding that "the fame of Castro Alves owes her a lot".

[1] For the American researcher of the work of Castro Alves, Jon M. Tolman, his "biography serves not to define poetry, nor as a key to its understanding, but only as a kind of historical fitting, where we can glimpse with more authenticity the tactic poet's creativity".

[75] The system of slavery prevailed in Brazil during the reign of emperor Pedro II, concentrating in the Northeast, in 1867, 47% of the captive population in the country (774 thousand people), while the cultivation of coffee in São Paulo led the number of slaves to double in the decade from 1864 to 1874 and made the abolitionist issue gain the same relevance there as in cities where the presence of blacks was large, such as Salvador and the capital of the Empire, Rio de Janeiro.

Italy and Germany lived through the struggles for their unification, reflecting nationalist ideas; in that first country, the guerrilla leader Giuseppe Garibaldi had played an important role, who, in addition to having already fought in Brazil, was married to the Brazilian Anita.

[81] In the words of authors Carlos Emílio Faraco and Francisco Marto de Moura in their analysis of O Navio Negreiro, the poetry of Castro Alves "reflects the historical moment of the time: the decline of the monarchy, the abolitionist struggle and the republican campaign".

[86] Several European authors influenced Castro Alves: Lord Byron, Lamartine, Musset, Heinrich Heine and even Shakespeare who, translated into French, "became a true romantic obsession" in the words of Lêdo Ivo.

[88] For Faraco and Moura, contrary to the other romantic poets who explained their lack of adaptation to the outside world as the result of their internal conflicts, Castro Alves justified this problem with the maladjustment of man to his environment and in the "eternal struggle between oppressors and oppressed"; the poet's production has, in addition to the lyrical and amorous production, the "poetry of a social character"; even in the case of the lyrical verses, Castro Alves is distinguished by having "a more realistic and sensual vision of love and women", as these, although still ideally beautiful and perfect, are concrete, materialized people.

Within a narrow limit, it is possible to allude to a certain progressive exhaustion of his lyric after 1869 (...) If the work of Castro Alves' adolescence is dotted with pastichos, his coming of age will suffer from completely unnecessary interferences (...) The impression he leaves us, in the final phase, is not quite that of a 'satisfied', of a 'fulfilled' man: it is of an annihilated one - with the peculiar bursts of optimism and energy".

[91] Contradicting Fausto Cunha's position, Jon M. Tolman said that the analysis of the poet's work suffers from the insertion of old productions among recent ones, as occurs in anthologies, noting that his final production has few admirers in Brazil; Tolman considered that "poetry written after returning to Bahia presents marked integral characteristics" and that the analysis made of his mature verses mix with others from earlier periods; about negative criticism such as that of Cunha, the American author concluded: "One of the disadvantages of literary acclaim is the weight of the critic's judgment, which often interferes with fair appreciation".

[93][w] On 6 July 1881, ten years after the poet's death, the so-called Largo do Teatro, one of the main squares in Salvador, was renamed in his honor; in 1919 a statue was commissioned from the Italian sculptor Pasquale de Chirico; the monument was installed in the place where the "Fountain of Columbus" used to be and inaugurated on 6 July 1923; the statue, measuring 2.9 meters, is positioned on a pedestal (which gives it a total height of 11 meters) on the front of which is a sculpture of a couple of slaves, symbolizing their abolitionist struggle: Castro Alves Square is one of Salvador's symbols.

The original project would be in charge of the architects Alcides da Rocha Miranda and José de Souza Reis but, with Otávio Mangabeira assuming the state government, he passed the task to engineer Diógenes Rebouças, who started the work with a bold architecture.

At the end of Mangabeira's term, Balbino was elected governor and, with an award-winning project, entrusted the work to José Bina Fonyat Filho and Humberto Lemos; the inauguration was scheduled to take place on 4 July 1958 but, five days before, a mysterious fire almost completely destroyed it.

[106] In 1947, in Recife, a bust was inaugurated in honor of the poet's centenary, a work carried out by the sculptor Celso Antônio de Menezes, located in Adolfo Cirne square, in front of the same Faculty of Law where Castro Alves once studied.

[109] The contest ended in 1947, the year of the poet's centenary, and the meeting to choose the winner (in which Mateus Fernandes, Celita Vacani, Francisco Andrade, Almir Pinto, Honório Peçanha and Modestino Kanto also competed) was documented on film.

[115] In his speech, which the protocol called for to be complimentary, he turned to the controversial nature of his writings, offending even the President of the Republic, Afonso Pena, present there — in addition to harsh criticism of Castro Alves (patron), Valentim (founder) and Cunha (to take office).

[42] In 1882, a parody of O Navio Negreiro was published in Rio de Janeiro, with the title A Canoa do Martinho, part of Political Satires and anonymously authored (it kept the signature of "Musset", one of the writers of predilection of Castro Alves).

[126] His popular acceptance made him one of the best known poets in the country, lending his name to public places, educational and cultural establishments, associations and even companies; it also appeared in cigarette and match brands; artists such as Benedito Irivaldo de Souza, known as Vado, performed more than five thousand theatrical presentations of O Navio Negreiro in São Paulo, which he took to schools and theaters in that state.

[129] Director Leitão de Barros also wrote a book that tells the story of the film, entitled "How I saw Castro Alves and Eugênia Câmara in the wonderful whirlwind of their lives" about that "eloquent young man from Muritiba" and his Portuguese lover.