The literary critic Alfredo Bosi considers his 1882 work Fanfarras to have launched the Parnassian movement in Brazilian literature.

As a journalist, he wrote for the newspapers A Província de São Paulo, A República and José Veríssimo's Revista Brasileira.

José Veríssimo, in "História da Literatura Brasileira", records that "The romantic inspiration so consonant with our literary nature, as we can see, had not totally faded away under the influence of the new poetics.

Not only is it still visible in those poems, but in two new poets who appeared around this time, Mr. Alberto de Oliveira, who would become perhaps the most typical of our parnasians, and the ill-fated Teófilo Dias.

The work "Fanfarras" is really considered the most important of his production, especially for the milestone of literary rupture, as also emphasized by Antônio Cândido: "despite the numerical predominance in his work of verses of romantic inspiration, translations and social poetry, its validity is due, today, to the poems of the first part of Fanfarras, significantly entitled 'Flores Funestas'."