Notes for a Cartography of Twentieth-Century Portuguese Poetry

Abstract

Joaquim Manuel Magalhaes has at various moments insisted on the importance of romanticism as "an ever present aesthetic category" in modern Portuguese poetry. He links that importance to the "fact of Portuguese poetry never having recognized Romanticism as a precise historical category" and to the relative weakness of Portuguese historical romanticism in the European panorama, resulting in a species of romanticism that lingers on as "an endemic echo". Pessanha is the music that was missing from the rest of Portuguese Symbolism ; his work is like the prosodic trail of a missing subject, for whom poetry is invention and the crisis of feeling set to words. Resistance to Pessoa, which these highly individual poetic voices successfully achieved for their time, can also be identified in the Portuguese surrealists. A related question is that of appropriation and/or confrontation vis-à-vis the most influential poetic movements of the time, and vis-à-vis the great—or at least widely read—poetic voices from the 1940s.