The agony of the poem: the confusion of modern art styles in the poetry of Murilo Mendes

Abstract

To express the dualities and contrasts of his subjectivity and vision of the world, Murilo Mendes performs his poetry from certain procedures and resources configurators of an agonic poetics. He vibrates in the language and in the organization of the verse the sense of tension and desarticulation that affects the existential and historical experience in expression in the poem. This text approaches the artistic procedures recurrently employed by the poet in the realization of this poetics, as well as the relation between this stylistic resources and currents of modern art: with respect to the verse, the complex of cuts and juxtapositions to which he is subjected; in the plane of sonority and rhythm, the dissonances, relative to the contrapontística and atonal music of Dodecaphonism; and, as for the image, the technique of collage from Surrealism and the contrast between elements of disparate realities that it implies.