After writing four books in five years, Vinicius did the opposite: he spent five years without publishing. During this period, your life goes through a series of intense changes. Among them, the main one: he marries Beatriz Azevedo de Mello, Tati, his first wife. After a brief stay in England to study literature, he lived in Gávea and, in 1940, had his first daughter, Susana. He moved to Leblon and began his diplomatic career in 1942.
The year 1942 was decisive in Vinicius' life. That's when he gets to know other social realities in Rio and Brazil alongside the American writer Waldo Frank. Another memorable trip was to Minas Gerais, an occasion in which he created eternal bonds with the State and made friends such as Otto Lara Resende, Paulo Mendes Campos, Fernando Sabino and Hélio Pellegrino. It was also when he had the first impulse to start conceiving what years later would become the play Orfeu da Conceição. Vinicius was already a mature man, married, and worked in the Rio press, writing mainly about cinema.
Thus, his Five Elegies are the result of this moment in which Vinicius closes a cycle of life, linked to Catholic youth and a circumspect poetics, to inaugurate another, linked to life on the streets, to open love and to an intense intellectual activity – be it in books and newspapers, or in the bars that brought together the cream of Rio and Brazilian arts and thought at the time.
Another point to see this aspect of balancing and overcoming the book, in addition to the formal boldness and experimentation with poetic language that we can find in many of its verses, is the reunion of its past with its present. The volume, created with the help of friends such as Manuel Bandeira and Aníbal Machado – is dedicated to Otavio de Faria, Mario Vieira de Mello and José Arthur da Frota Moreira, friends from his youth, those who led him to poetry. Cinco Elegias closes a period of Vinícius, publishing poems that were written or started in 1937 and, six years later, take shape in the book.
