Murilo Mendes in the newspapers: between politics and religion

Abstract

This article begins with the set of articles written by Murilo Mendes to Dom Casmurro newspaper in 1937 and finds a place to the poet among catholic intellectuals, one of the constitutive forces of the politics in Brazil, in a period of intense polemics. Being a spokesman of advanced tendencies of the Catholicism, whose origin was French, he strongly proposes that as the path to the modernization of brazilian society. From 1950’s on, living in Italy, the presence of
the Catholicism in Murilo’s writings gets weaker. Some important names of his criticism, nevertheless, like Oreste Macrì, Ruggero Jacobbi e Mario Luzi, will associate his books to the Ita lian tendency of modern lyric, the hermeticism, in which the conceptions of Catholicism, civilization and poetry are interchangea ble and unified in a project that wants to be universal and eternal.