ENTRE O SAGRADO E O PROFANO: metáforas religiosas na experiência poética de Manoel de Barros

Abstract

This study examines religious images and metaphors in the poetry of Manoel de Barros, focusing on the productive tension between the sacred and the profane. Departing from the understanding that Barros’s poetics is grounded in the valorization of what is minimal, useless, and marginal, the research investigates how the poet reworks symbols, lexicon, and discursive structures traditionally associated with the religious field, subverting their normative meanings and opening new possibilities for experiencing the sacred. The theoretical framework articulates religion, language, and literature, drawing primarily on Mircea Eliade’s reflections on hierophany and the sacred–profane distinction, the conceptual metaphor theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as well as Paul Tillich’s discussions of the symbolic nature of religious language. The analysis also engages with Brazilian literary criticism, especially Antonio Candido, and with contemporary studies by Adalberto Müller, which contribute to the understanding of a poetics of refusal and negativity. The corpus centers on the poem “Pedido (quase uma prece)” (“Request [Almost a Prayer]”), in which the traditional form of prayer is reconfigured into a poetic gesture that displaces transcendence toward materiality, childhood, and the fragility of the world. The study demonstrates that, in Manoel de Barros’s work, the sacred does not appear as an elevated or dogmatic instance, but rather as a sensitive, linguistic, and imaginative experience. Ultimately, the research argues that Barros’s poetry critiques modern instrumental rationality and proposes an ethics of perception that reinscribes the sacred within the profane through the creative power of poetic language