Utopia and poetry’s status in selected poems by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Abstract

This article discusses the existence of a utopian dimension in the poetry of the Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and the way this dimension is constituted in her poetry. We base our analysis in a selection of poems from different moments of her poetic work. Our starting point for the study of the poetic corpus is the hypothesis that Andresen’s poetry aims to re-establish the connection between the world and the sphere of the sacred, based on the poetic word. The poetic speaker seeks a religious experience, the encounter with the divine and the redemption that would result from it, which derives from the poet’s poetic gesture and Utopia e estatuto da poesia em poemas de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen also from the world he contemplates. This encounter happens in a sort of suspended time that has no beginning or no end. In this context, poetry itself would be an attempt to achieve, even if only momentarily and sometimes just as a desire, the plenitude of the union with God and the divine. It seems that, in Andresen’s poetry, there is a kind of principle of hope, a belief in the realization of her utopian project, which is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic, insofar as it gains form based on the encounter between sensible reality and transcendence through poetic elocution. Poetry regains, in Andresen’s work, its status as a sacred poetic place, at the same time as the poet appears as a figure capable of capturing and revealing the instants of the presence of God in the world.