Abstract: Ascension in Free Fall: Augusto dos Anjos and the Infernalization of the World. This study propounds a reading of Augusto dos Anjos's Eu e Outras Poesias [I and Other Poems] based on the mapping of the main philosophic, scientific and esthetic influences that were the foundation of the author's pessimistic and decaying world vision. These influences came predominantly from Europe, and it can be said that the poet synthesizes in his works the cultivated mentality at the turn of the XIX to XX century, where converge various streams of thought which in principle appear as absolutely antagonics: some scientific lines (represented by the evolutionism of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer and by the biological monism of Ernst Haeckel), and the irrationalism (represented by the philosophy of will of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche). In Augusto's works, both lines of thought co-exist, not harmonically, but dialectically. Besides this initial mapping, it was necessary to describe and to analyze some of the principal thematic and imaginative elements, the original stylistic resources, and the most important and characteristic esthetic procedures present in his works. In general this, study aims at finding, in the fragmented composition of the poetic pieces, an architecture that is sustained upon three specific pillars that reaffirm poet's depreciative conception of human existence, which are: the animalization of man, the carnalization of God, and the infernalization of the world. This afflicted vision of an indifferent or even hostile universe where human beings live characterizes the cosmogonie perspective of the Augustinian poetry and has as its origin the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. The ethical and esthetical grounds of Augusto's work are also influenced by Schopenhauer's compassionate ethics allied with his idea that the only possibility of human redemption must be found in the artistic manifestation and the denial of the will. Therefore, Augusto dos Anjos in his profoundly philosophic poetry and in his extremely lucid conception of world, constructs an opus dominated by the tragic feeling of existence, where the artistic catharsis appears as the principal way of overcoming the limitations and suffering of the human condition and of achieving spiritual elevation and serene wisdom.