Page "Vinicius de Moraes" Paragraph 3

Faria encouraged Moraes ' literary vocation, turning him into a kind of rightwing fellow traveller.

Vinícius de Moraes received his B. A.

degree in Legal and Social Sciences in 1933.

Upon completing his studies, he published his first two collections of poetry: Caminho Para a Distância (" Path into Distance ") ( 1933 ) and Forma e Exegese (" Form and Exegesis ").

Both collections were composed and published under Octavio de Faria's informal editorship, and that accounts for their style and subject-matter: a heavy, rhetorics-laden symbolist poetry, concerned above all with Catholic mysticism and the search for redemption against sexual seduction ( in Faria's words, the conflict between " impossible purity and unacceptable impurity ").

Faria, at the time ( 1935 ) was to write a essay (" Two Poets ") comparing Vinícius's poetry with that of his symbolist and Catholic comrade-in-arms, Augusto Frederico Schmidt.

However, the tension between Faria and Moraes ' joint Catholic activism and Faria's homosexual attraction toward Vinícius was eventually to generate a cooling in their mutual friendship-Faria having even attempted suicide because of his unrequited love for Vinicius.

Despite their mutual estrangement, Vinícius would afterwards write two sonnets-the first in 1939 (" Sonnet to Octavio de Faria "), the second during the 1960s (" Octavio ") in ( ambivalent ) praise of his old friend.