Background
Olavo was born in Rio de Janeiro, on December 16, 1865 to Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac and Delfina Belmira Gomes de Paula.
Olavo was born in Rio de Janeiro, on December 16, 1865 to Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac and Delfina Belmira Gomes de Paula.
As a young man, he was a brilliant student, enrolling in the school of medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro at the age of 15. Then he began the study of medicine and law but abandoned them to devote himself to literature.
Olavo started his career as a journalist and published his first works in prose, but it was his poetry that won him renown. He presently became the leading figure of the Parnassian school in Brazil, and the cold and impassive splendor that characterized the writings of that group seems to have suited his temperament perfectly.
Olavo was such a master of verse techniques that his poems have the formal strength of sculpture. They have neither profound philosophical thought nor vibrant inner emotion, but Bilac's sense of the plastic richness of life, in all its variety of line, volume, and color, gives to his works a tone of serene voluptuousness. In subject matter he shunned the commonplace and instead turned to an almost ethereal striving for perfection, but he never failed to strike three notes dear to the Brazilian heart - eloquence, sonority, and sensuality - and his imagination never completely deserted the reality of common experience.
Nevertheless, however immediate Bilac's message was, it was delivered in such perfect style that it gave an air of grandeur to all his themes.
The body of his work is collected in two volumes under the title Poesias (1888 and 1902). The outstanding part of it is the Via-Lactea ("Milky Way"), 35 sonnets, in the metric form of which he attained a classic quality comparable to that of the French poet Heredia. These were later published in a separate limited edition.
Bilac died December 28, 1918, in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1919 a posthumous volume, Tarde ("Evening"), was published.
He was a member of the "Parnassian Triad".
Bilac was gifted with an unusual eloquence and was extremely sensitive to the music of words.
Bilac never married and never had children. He was engaged to Amélia de Oliveira, the sister of the poet, but their engagement was short-lived since it was opposed by another brother of Amélia, who said Bilac had no future.