The present thesis approaches the writing of Guimarães Rosa from the perspective of the inarticulate. It attends to those occasions in which his writing takes language to its intensive limit, at which it incorporates animal noises (grunting, howling, cawing, chirping, bleating, hissing, wheezing), natural sounds (wind, water, fire, etc.), and the musical register. Exploring the singular manner in which Rosa cultivates sonorities invested with anarchical and creative forces, the study shows that one of the most striking aspects of his work is the way it gives voice to the experience of the inarticulate within language. Such an experience manifests itself as a privileged site of destabilization of the traditional frontiers between what is conventionally called language and what is called life. This serves to reveal the material body of language as an irreducible condition for the creation of an intensive connection with life through literature. Rosa s thinking, as it is presented through his writing, is also put into dialogue with Gilles Deleuze s and Felix Guattari s notion of the intensive language and Friedrich Nietzsche s account of the Dionysian experience of music. The thesis consists of three chapters. The first approaches the inarticulate in the novella Buriti, from Corpo de Baile. It focusses on the character Chief Zequiel, who possesses a prodigious auditory sensitivity that allows him to perceive very slight, night-time sounds and convert them into a language that borders on squealing, howling, the whispering of the wind. The following chapter draws parallels between the reintroduction of noise into contemporary music by John Cage in particular and the intrusion of a multitude of non-lexicographic sonorities into Rosa s writing. This musical analogy is also intertwined with an interpretation of the neglected novella, A estória do homem do Pinguelo, from Estas Estórias. The third and final chapter discusses the alliance between poetry, music and inarticulate language at the heart of Rosa s literary oeuvre. It regards his creative process as a transmutation of the pre-articulate forces and affects present in sounds into a poetic language that is intimately intertwined with musicality. Finally, it proposes a reading of Cara-de-bronze from Corpo de Baile and Duelo from Sagarana.