Introduction

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 2 (2020), 129–31© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Introduction Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros ‘Is poetry important?’ asks Bernard O’Donoghue right at the beginning of his recentPoetry:AVeryShortIntroduction.1 Thisquestioning,andself-questioning, of poetry is so common as to probably qualify as one of poetry’s hallmarks. Suspicions of poetry, as well as grand claims about it, abound. From Plato’s (in)famous banishment of the poets from the ideal city, to Shelley’s equally wellknown and often cited assertion that ‘[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’,2 poetry, it seems, can stand for anything. Adrienne Rich has often questioned what the role and function of poetry is, and, more to our point now, what poetry’s standing in the world is. In a short essay printed in The Guardian, Adrienne Rich took this in her incomparable way, and commented ironically on the ‘free market view’ of poetry that would render it redundant: ‘There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together — and more’.3 The imbrications of poetry in society as well as poetry’s aesthetic claims, as Rich points out, do not constitute a paradox at all, and certainly are not mutually exclusive: ‘we can also define the “aesthetic”, not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, which totalising systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched’. This is also, in a sense, what Emily Dickinson expressed so well, as O’Donoghue reminds us: ‘I dwell in Possibility — | A fairer House than Prose — | More numerous of Windows — | Superior — for Doors –’.4 Without claiming any universality for poetry, and mindful of the historical specificities that always inform any cultural expression, we would like to affirm much the same qualities, the same degree of introspection and critical self-reflection, of engagement with society in all of its variants, and the same exalted claims on 1 Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 1. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [1821; 1840], in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 701. 3 Adrienne Rich, ‘Legislators of the World’, Guardian, 18 November 2006, [accessed 29 February 2020]. 4 Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), p, 327; here as quoted by O’Donoghue, p. 47. Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros 130 the aesthetic and the emphasis on form, from within the very multiplicity of voices and shapes, as marking contemporary Portuguese poetry. The present special issue of Portuguese Studies wants to focus on this poetry, from the latter part of the twentieth century to our actual present. This poetry figures here in various ways, most directly with the section containing a brief anthology of texts from some of contemporary Portuguese poetry’s most significant authors. And of course the collection of critical essays that engage with the various issues and problematics that have marked this poetry, including a continuous experimentation in terms of form, media, and intermediality. Added to this we also have six reviews of recent books and journals that allow for yet another view of our subject’s vibrancy. As organizers we refused any illusions or aspirations to exhaustive coverage, which would in any case always be impossible, even if we had more than the space of any one volume. Nonetheless we think that the current special issue, in both its critical and anthological components, allows for a productive reflection concerning the main lines that have been structuring contemporary Portuguese poetry, without dismissing in any way its modernist foundations. Indeed, it is not haphazardly that the critical essays, when read in sequence, make abundantly...