Poetic Word and Otherness in António Ramos Rosa and Manoel de Barros

In this chapter, we will try to reflect on the passage from the “I” to the “Other” which, being propitiated by the specificity of poetic discourse, has become particularly pressing in modern poetry. To do so, we will pay attention to the poetry of two of the greatest Portuguese-speaking poets of the twentieth century, the Portuguese António Ramos Rosa and the Brazilian Manoel de Barros, authors in whom we discover a poetic construction that continually enacts a process of depersonalisation and, simultaneously, a passage to otherness. Based on the strong affinity that emerges between the writings of the two poets—an affinity whose contours will lead us to the new ontology of some post-Heideggerian philosophers, as well as to an ontophenomenology such as that of Merleau-Ponty—we will be interested in assessing the extent to which their poetry helps us to think of the poetic word as a privileged resource for becoming “other”.