And the word became passage: poetics between the sea and the desert

Abstract

This article analyzes landscape-thinking in the poetics of Ruy Belo and Tito Leite, showing how, in distinct historical and cultural contexts, both transform the word into a space of passage and resistance. In Ruy Belo, a twentieth-century Portuguese poet, the landscape takes shape as a spiritual and ethical topography, a metaphor for errancy and the search for transcendence in the face of historical contingency and modern solitude (Belo, 1969; 2009). In Tito Leite, a contemporary Brazilian poet, these images shift toward a recent horizon, in which the desert and urban landscape reflects sensory saturation and the crisis of the sacred (Leite, 2023).