Antero Tarquínio de Quental

Antero Tarquínio de Quental (born April 18, 1842, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Port.—died Sept. 11, 1891, Ponta Delgada) was a Portuguese poet who was a leader of the Generation of Coimbra, a group of young poets associated with the University of Coimbra in the 1860s who revolted against Romanticism and struggled to create a new outlook in literature and society.

He came from an aristocratic family that included writers and mystics, and Quental himself had mystical leanings that pervaded his poetry. Between 1858 and 1864, while studying law at Coimbra, he wrote his Romantic early poems, Raios de Extincta Luz (“Rays of Vanishing Light”) and the delicate lyrics published in 1872 as Primaveras Românticas (“Romantic Springtimes”). These were soon followed by Odes Modernas (1865), a volume of socially critical poetry that won him an intellectual and moral ascendancy among his fellow students. His pamphlet Bom-senso e Bom-gosto (1865; “Good Sense and Good Taste”), attacking the hidebound formalism of Portuguese literature, marked the opening of a war against the older literary generation that was waged until 1871, when a series of “democratic lectures,” organized by Quental and held in the Lisbon Casino, dealt the deathblow to Romanticism.

After leaving Coimbra, Quental tried a job as a typographer, first in Lisbon and then (1867) in Paris. Six months of working-class life disillusioned him of his dream of becoming a modern apostle of social change, however, and eventually ill health forced him to return to Portugal. After a trip in a sailboat to the United States and Canada (1869), he went back to Lisbon, where he engaged in propaganda activities on behalf of the workers and collaborated in the attempt to organize the First International (first international federation of working-class parties) in Portugal. He was influenced by the socialist theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and edited a socialist journal.

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Amid all this activity, Quental was troubled by increasing discontent. He abandoned many cherished projects and tore up his early poems. He developed a spinal disease for which treatment gave only temporary relief. During a period of renewed calm he wrote some of his last and finest sonnets.

In 1881 he retired to Vila do Conde, near Porto, to supervise the upbringing of two orphan girls he had adopted. On a visit to his family in Ponta Delgada, suffering from physical pain, insomnia, and acute depression, he killed himself.

As a poet Quental made few formal innovations. He was a master of the sonnet, however, and the 109 sonnets of Os Sonetos Completos (1886) are a history of his spiritual progress, giving expression both to his personal anxieties and to the larger ideological issues in Portugal as that country was exposed to late 19th-century European thought. Quental’s Sonnets and Poems (1922), translated by S. Griswold Morley, was reprinted in 1977.