Auta de Souza
{{short description|Brazilian poet}}
{{expand Portuguese|topic=bio|date=July 2020}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Auta de Souza
| image = Auta de souza.jpg
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1876|09|12|df=y}}
| birth_place = Macaíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1901|02|07|1876|09|12|df=y}}
| death_place = Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
| occupation = Poet
| movement = Romanticism, Symbolism
| notableworks = Horto
}}
Auta de Souza (12 September 1876 — 7 February 1901) was a Brazilian poet.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CDssBwAAQBAJ|title=The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies|last=Valdés|first=Vanessa K.|date=2012-01-17|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|isbn=9781443836777|language=en}} She wrote Romantic poems, with some Symbolistic influence.
Souza published only one book in her lifetime, Horto. Folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo deemed her as "the greatest mystical poet in Brazil".{{Cite web|url=http://www.linguagemviva.com.br/auta.html|title=Souza, Auta de, 1876-1901|website=www.linguagemviva.com.br|access-date=2016-04-12}}
Life
Souza was born in Macaíba, daughter of Elói Castriciano de Souza and Henriqueta Leopoldina Rodrigues.
She became an orphan when she was three, with her mother's death by tuberculosis; her father died of the same disease the next year. Souza was then raised by her maternal grandmother in Recife, where she took particular classes. When she was eleven, she was enrolled at the Colégio São Vicente de Paula, a Catholic school run by Vicentin nuns. Souza left school when she was fourteen because of a tuberculosis diagnostic, but then she became an autodidact.
At eighteen, she began to collaborate with the magazine Oasis, and at twenty wrote for A República, a larger circulation newspaper which gave her visibility to other regions' press. Her poems were published in Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Paiz.
The following year she would write assiduously for Natal newspaper A Tribuna, and her verses were published together with several writers from Brazil northeast.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AWd8QCXPQu0C|title=Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics|last=Callahan|first=Monique-Adelle|date=2011-04-22|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=9780199876693|language=en}} Between 1899 and 1900, she signed his poems under the pseudonyms "Ida Salúcio" and "Hilário das Neves". Several of her poems were adapted as lyrics for modinhas - popular songforms of nineteenth century Brazil.
In 1900 she published her only book, Horto, prefaced by Olavo Bilac.
= Death =
Auta de Souza died on 7 February 1901, in Natal, of tuberculosis. She was buried at Cemitério do Alecrim, but in 1904 her remains were moved to the family grave, at the church of Our Lady of Conception, in her birth city, Macaíba.
References
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Category:20th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Category:19th-century Brazilian poets
Category:People from Rio Grande do Norte
Category:19th-century Brazilian women writers