Guimarães Rosa and the humanistic platonism

Abstract

The present essay aims to establish a dialogue between Guimarães Rosa, and the critical reception of his work, with the philosopher Plato. Rosa, who openly claimed to be a reader of Plato, evoked Platonic thought as a rich and important key to reading his work, with Benedito Nunes being one of the main decipherers of the Platonic dimension in Rosian prose. Despite the forceful points made by Nunes, it is still possible to observe – through the highlights and comments highlighted by Guimarães Rosa in the volumes of the work of the Greek philosopher that he had in his personal library – that Rosa could have read the Platonic work for the poetic touch that it suggests, especially within its metaphysics. In this sense, Guimarães Rosa subverts the canonized image of a purely rationalist Plato for a Plato of enormous poetic force, which would have influenced the humanistic language of the Minas Gerais author.