The 18th century

Literary culture of the 18th century in Portugal, as in Spain, showed the influence of French classicism and of the Enlightenment; the ideas of the latter would be mobilized as a challenge to the aristocracy. Barbadiño (pseudonym of the theologian and philosopher Luís António Verney) poured scorn on prevailing methods of education in Veradeiro método de estudar (1746; “True Method of Studying”). Matias Aires, who studied science in Spain and France, returned to Portugal to write Reflexões sobre a vaidade (1752; “Reflections on Vanity”), a philosophical and moral critique expressing his skeptical conclusions about human nature. Men of liberal ideas traveled to France and England; with their subsequent writings they set an example that gave rise to Enlightenment-inspired reforms, particularly in education and science, that invaded every other branch of letters. Among the most influential were Alexandre de Gusmão, Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, António Ribeiro Sanches, José Correia da Serra, Avelar Brotero, and Francisco Manuel do Nascimento. New literary societies called arcádias, which aimed to revive poetry by urging a return to Classicism, cooperated in the task of reform. In 1720 King John (João) V established the Royal Academy of Portuguese History, which counted among its members such men as António Caetano de Sousa, author of the colossal História genealógica da casa real portuguesa (1735–49; “Genealogical History of the Portuguese Royal House”). The Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1779, initiated research into the study of Portuguese literary history. In its ranks were found nearly all the scholars of note at the end of the century, such as the ecclesiastical historian Manuel do Cenáculo; António Ribeiro dos Santos, a scientist; João Pedro Ribeiro, a historian; and the critics Francisco Alexandre Lobo and Fortunato de São Boaventura.

In 1756 António Dinis da Cruz e Silva established the Arcádia Lusitana (also called the Arcádia Ulissiponense), its first aim being the uprooting of Spanish influence. The bucolic verse of Domingos dos Reis Quita signified a return to the native Portuguese tradition of two centuries earlier. Sincerity and suffering spoke in the poetry of Tomás António Gonzaga, who was born and educated in Portugal and was in 1782 named a judge in Brazil, where he wrote his Marília de Dirceu (1792, expanded in 1799; “Marília of Dirceu”), consisting of love lyrics in a pastoral setting. In 1790 the Nova Arcádia came into being, its two most distinguished members being the rival poets Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, a precursor of the Romantic spirit, and José Agostinho de Macedo, a satirist.

Outside the arcádias stood the dissidentes, among whom were at least two writers of distinction: the satirist Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida, who painted the customs and follies of his day with devastating accuracy, and Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (pseudonym Filinto Elísio), who addressed himself perseveringly to purifying the language and to restoring the cult of the 16th-century poets.

Early in the 18th century, popular authors attempted a revival of the drama in Lisbon. The Óperas portuguesas (published 1733–41; “Portuguese Operas”), written by António José da Silva for puppet theatre, owe their name to the arias, minuets, and modinhas (light popular songs) interspersed among the prose dialogue of these works. Known as “O Judeu” (“The Jew”), Silva had been forcibly converted to Christianity in his 20s; his satirical themes attracted the condemnation of the Inquisition, and he was executed in an auto-da-fé (“act of faith”) in Lisbon in 1739.

The 19th century

Poetry

With the arrival of Romanticism in Portugal, the 19th century witnessed a general renewal of Portuguese letters. In poetry and drama João Baptista de Almeida Garrett, by reviving medieval and national historical themes, became the country’s chief exponent of the movement. He read literature in English and French and introduced Portugal to nationalistic Romanticism through two epics, Camões (1825) and Dona Branca (1826). Garrett, who spent most of the 1820s in England because of his outspoken opposition to Portugal’s government, envisioned his exile and persecution in both works, whether through Camões’s separation from his country or through Dona Branca’s being kidnapped by the last Moorish king of Silves.

António Feliciano de Castilho, mixing Classicism with Romanticism, exercised much influence over a younger generation of poets, including João de Lemos, Soares de Passos, and Tomás Ribeiro (author of the ardently patriotic D. Jaime, 1862). In 1865 Antero Tarquínio de Quental, a student of German philosophy and poetry, and Teófilo Braga, a disciple of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, led a revolt against the primacy of Castilho. The Campo de flores (1893; “Field of Flowers”) of João de Deus contained some of the finest short poems in the language, marked by a spontaneous simplicity. Abílio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro, whose work showed him to be an heir to the French poet Victor Hugo, was a would-be social revolutionary prone to grandiloquence. In Os simples (1892) he turned to the portrayal of peasant life, and this work constituted his finest poetry. Akin to him was António Duarte Gomes Leal, author of Claridades do sul (1875; “Clarities of the South”) and O Anti-Cristo (1884; “The Anti-Christ”), who could likewise achieve quiet sincerity when dealing with humble themes.

Cesário Verde, considered by some to be the greatest poet of the 19th century, addressed himself to the poetic essence of common realities; “Sentimento de um occidental” (“Feelings of a Westerner”) is a poem saturated in irony and alienation that depicts a prototype of the flaneur figure (an urban wanderer) that would later be developed in literary Modernism. António Nobre’s Só (1892; “Alone”) is intensely Portuguese in its themes, mood, and rhythms; he and Teixeira de Pascoaes developed a cult of saudade (“yearning,” or “nostalgia”)—a movement that came to be known as saudosismo—that dominated the aesthetic of the time. The French Symbolist movement found an enthusiastic adept in Eugénio de Castro, and António Candido Gonçalves Crespo stood out as the first of his country’s Parnassians. Camilo Pessanha—who lived and wrote in the Portuguese colony of Macau, in China—bridged the 19th and 20th centuries: he carried Symbolist verse to a point at which its musicality and images became fragmented and dispersed. Collected in Clepsidra (1920; “Water Clock”), Pessanha’s poetry had previously attracted the attention of Fernando Pessoa, with whom he corresponded, and the poets of the avant-garde review Orpheu (founded 1915). A fin de siècle current of exoticism and Orientalism is present in the works of Wenceslau de Moraes, a Portuguese counterpart to the French novelist Pierre Loti. Moraes was a diplomat who spent the final 30 years of his life in Japan, where he adopted the culture, converted to Buddhism, and, beginning in the 1890s, published a series of books describing Japanese culture to the West.