“It’s Useless to Add that Your Opinion Is Very Important to Me”: Murilo Mendes Writes from Rome to Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Abstract

In the Archive-museum of Brazilian literature at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro there are letters sent by Murilo Mendes to Carlos Drummond de Andrade between 1930 and 1971. There is no information about Drummond’s letters to Murilo (with rare exceptions). The correspondence is important, because it points not only to unpublished biobibliographical data, but also to aspects of the historical, cultural, and literary context in which the authors carried out their own poetic production. In this sense, the correspondence, in addition to providing information about the genesis of the authors’ work, constitutes the ideal space for the exercise of criticism by the two poets. The objective of this essay is to reconstruct, through unpublished letters sent by Murilo Mendes to Carlos Drummond de Andrade, elements of Murilo Mendes’ biography and production, with an emphasis on the period of the so-called “Italian phase” (1957-1975).