Welcome to Portuguese poetry - January 2006

April 14, 2006 Antero de Quental, whose poetry began to be translated in his own lifetime, was immensely popular for at least four decades after his death. Fernando Pessoa (some of whose poetry we plan to feature in the near future) was a great admirer of his work, and even translated several of his sonnets into English. He considered the Azorean writer to be Portugal’s first ‘metaphysical poet’, and his influence is discernible in some of the more cerebral poems of Pessoa, who once described himself as “a poet animated by philosophy”. If the idea-driven essence of Antero de Quental’s poetry made it widely appreciated in the early years of the twentieth century, when faith in science and rational solutions to the world’s problems ran high, that same essence made it fall out of favor after the second world war. In recent years Antero (as he is referred to by the Portuguese) has made a partial comeback, and no one would deny his historical importance. His poetry – and even more so his lectures and essays, as well as his political activity on behalf of workers (he helped organize Portugal’s first trade unions) – had an internationalizing effect on what had been a rather isolated country.

A generation later, Teixeira de Pascoaes felt that the Portuguese had sold themselves short, becoming too concerned with what the rest of Europe was thinking and doing. He helped found a movement advocating a return to roots and to the ‘Portuguese soul’, supposedly imbued with a unique kind of longing (saudade) that could be a force for change. His vision and his poetry were unabashedly mystical, and Fernando Pessoa initially shared the vision and greatly lauded the poetry, but his enthusiasm soon waned, and eventually gave way to a thinly-veiled disdain. Pascoaes’ many volumes of poetry and prose (the latter includes several idealized biographies) have remained in print, and some people are great fans of his work; others find it insipid.

The poetry of Antero (except in its last phase) is radically unlike that of Pascoaes, and yet both poetic oeuvres suffer from a similar problem: they tend to be programmatic, and may at times seem to be mere vehicles for the poets’ respective opinions and doctrines. It is as if the poems didn’t have their own life, apart from the opinions and doctrines they convey.

On the other hand, the fervent dedication of both poets to their respective missionary causes confers a seal of integrity on the feelings contained in their work. They lived and breathed what they wrote. Pascoaes seemed to be greatly at peace with himself and the world, whereas Antero was a troubled soul, an inveterate pessimist who struggled against depression without success, ultimately committing suicide. Coming to feel that philosophical and political solutions could not save himself or the country, Antero himself became a mystic in his later years, holding views that were similar to Pascoaes’. But he lacked faith, or his mental demons were too powerful for him to hold down.

When he was 23 years old, Antero de Quental published a famous pamphlet, “Good Sense and Good Taste”, which castigated the older literary generation for having no ideas. Antero had very definite ideas, Pascoaes had other ones, and both built their poetry around them. It is not the sort of poetry that current taste seems to favor. But individual taste, to the extent it manages to be truly individual, may react differently.