Religious Images in Brazilian Poetry of the 19th–20th Centuries as a Reflection of the Transformation of Sociocultural Identity

This article is an attempt at a comprehensive interdisciplinary study focused on reconstructing the formation and transformation of Brazilian national identity through the prism of the evolution of key religious images in poetic discourse over two centuries. Based on an extensive corpus of texts by Brazilian poets from Romanticism to Postmodernism — including both canonical figures (Gonçalves Dias, Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac) and key representatives of the Afro-Brazilian tradition (Cruz e Sousa, Abdias do Nascimento, Edimilson de Almeida) — the author identified three recurring hallmarks of Brazil’s identity transformation: search for God (in all His manifestations), time and eternity (including through metaphors of the sea and the river), and search for the meaning of life (the concepts of happiness and joy). The research combines historical and cultural analysis, which helps to analyze poetry as a projection of deeper social shifts, with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, which is instrumental in interpreting poetic symbols as codes of collective consciousness. The work traces how Brazil’s religious landscape changed over the history, from the establishment of Catholicism as the foundation of nation building in the poetry of the 19th-century Romantic poets to the existential quest and return of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in modernism, and the polyphony of identities in 20th-century postmodernist poetry. The study of all these stages shows that Brazilian poets have reflected in depth on the changes in the country’s religious life. Moreover, it reveals how multifaceted the mechanisms of nation-building are, and how essential the religious imaginary is to this process.