"FREEDOM IN THE FAITH" Christianity, poetry and contemporary in Murilo Mendes

Abstract

Murilo Mendes stands out as one of the most inventive contemporary Brazilian poets of modernist matrix. So it was surprising the publication of "Time and Eternity" (1935), under the slogan "Let us restore poetry in Christ", whose seemingly reactive tone suggests that there the poet disowned its modern condition and at least restricted the artistic vocation. However, this aesthetic-existential turning intensifies stylistic features and opens other sensitive areas and thematic horizons in his poetry, operating a symbolic transfiguration without defibering his creator elan, or taming your unruly virulence. The "restoration" of poetry "in Christ" not capitulates the creative freedom of the poet to an prior metaphysics order, but provides you the encounter with an unprecedented redemptive power of meaning that gives you new and definitive reason to sing. To reconcile freedom and faith, creation and reverence, and by extension, God and man, time and eternity etc., converting the supposed contradiction in tense and fruitful contrast, the poetry of Murilo Mendes reveals a promising reading perspective of the Christian mystery here we call transmodern, which, without being anti-modern or "reactionary" - to take on the adventure of freedom in the vertigo of the times -, goes beyond the modern paradigm, to remove the subject of a sterillant self-sufficiency and open it an ongoing dialogue with transcendence. This hermeneutical key is demonstrated from an approach of the principal phases and works of the author.