Based on the concept of anxiety of influence developed by Harold Bloom in his tetralogy of influence (1973-1976) and later reformulated in The anatomy of influence (2011), this study aims to analyze the works of the Brazilian contemporary poets Adriano Espínola and Eucanaã Ferraz as creative misreadings of João Cabral de Melo Neto s poetry. As a latecomer in the Brazilian Modernist Movement (Generation of 45), João Cabral had to put tremendous effort into defending himself against the modernist tradition already established by the time he started his career — among his poetic fathers are Willy Lewin, Joaquim Cardozo, Murilo Mendes and, above all, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. We intend to demonstrate that precisely he, the modernist who suffered the most from the anxiety of influence, produced a poetry so strong that it came to be the most difficult influence to overcome for all generations of Brazilian poets from the early 1960s to his death in 1999. The central part of our hypothesis is that Adriano Espínola and Eucanaã Ferraz, both debuting poets within that period, constructed their works against Cabral s, whether by appropriation or repression. For that purpose, the corpus under study consists of poems by Eucanaã Ferraz from his first book to the most recent (1990-2017) and of Adriano Espínola s personal anthology Escritos ao Sol (2015).