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This paper explores the images related to Carnival in the texts of early Brazilian modernist writers, who wanted to minimize the feeling of inauthenticity due to the systematic emulation of European aesthetic matrices. This critique of Brazilian ‘nationalist’ complexes was manifested in cultural forms which were unlinked from academic approaches, but were instead expressed in the registers of the popular songbook - sung-poems in which Carnival-related images abounded. In the analysis of this set of poems, the paper outlines the emerging of a poetry of ‘masking’, raising the hypothesis that these poets had invented a tradition that aimed for a native originality, having the celebration of Carnival and its mythical variants as its literary motivation. During the 1930's, Carnival-related images became rare in written poetry, establishing the sung poems as their permanent ground. With Orfeu da Conceição, in 1956, Vinicius de Moraes converged these two elements, dissolving the remaining boundaries that set them apart. This paper explores the images of Carnival and the mask, and attempts to unmask the characteristics of a form of Brazilian culture, including, in particular, its racism.