This article analyses one of the least emphasized aspects in the current interpretation of Euclides da Cunha's work, his affiliation with the asthetic trends and world views of Romanticism, remarkably present in Brazilian literature and culture during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the quest for those roots, we retrace briefly the traveled road of a "poetics of ruins" and its close connection with the author's eighteenth century and, closer to the author of Os sertões (Rebellion in the backlands), to Victor Hugo. Such affinities are pointed in some of Euclides da Cunha's least studied texts, among which "Poema rude" (Rough poem), written in 1895 at Campanha, Minas Gerais, and not included in his Obra completa (Complete work).
