Antero de Quental - Lisboa, Portugal
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manchanegra
N 38° 42.888 W 009° 09.570
29S E 486133 N 4285140
Antero de Quental was a Portuguese poet, philosopher and writer, whose works became a milestone in the Portuguese language, alongside those of Camões or Bocage.
Waymark Code: WMD7J3
Location: Lisboa, Portugal
Date Posted: 12/01/2011
Views: 9
Antero Tarquínio de Quental was a Portuguese poet, philosopher and writer, whose works became a milestone in the Portuguese language, alongside those of Camões or Bocage.
He was born in Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, into one of the oldest families of the provincial captaincy system. He was also a relative of Frei Bartolomeu de Quental, founder of the Congregation of the Oratory in Portugal.
He began to write poetry at an early age, chiefly, though not entirely, devoting himself to the sonnet. He took French lessons under António Feliciano de Castilho, a leading figure of Portuguese Romantic movement, who resided in Ponta Delgada at the time. Antero was seven when he enrolled in Liçeu Açoriano (a private school), where he received English lessons from a Mr. Rendall, a renowned prospector on the island. In August 1852, he moved with his mother to the Portuguese capital, where he studied at Colégio do Pórtico, whose headmaster was his old tutor Castilho. But the institution closed its doors, and Antero returned to Ponta Delgada in 1853.
Throughout the latter part of his life Quental would dedicate his studies to poetry, politics and philosophy. By 1855, at the age of 16, he had returned to Lisbon, then to Coimbra where he graduates from the Colégio de São Bento in 1857.
In the fall of 1856 he enrolled at the University of Coimbra, where he studied Law. He soon distinguished himself for his oral and written talents, as well as turbulent and eccentric nature. While in Coimbra, he founded the Sociedade do Raio, which pretended to promote literature to the masses, but which launched blasphemous challenges to religion.
In 1861, he published his first sonnets. Four years later, he published Odes Modernas, influenced by the Socialist Experimentalism of Proudhon, who championed an intellectual revolution. During that year a conflict (which would later be known as Questão Coimbrã) would develop between the traditionalist poets, championed by António Feliciano de Castilho (at that time the chief living poet of the elder generation), and a group of students (which included Antero Quintal, Teófilo Braga, Viera de Castro, Ramalho Ortigão, Guerra Junqueiro, Eça de Queiros, Oliveira Martins, Jaime Batalha Reis and Guilherme de Azevedo, among others). The contact with the nation's cultural and literary elite, the liberal and progressives in academia, did not identify with the aesthetic formalism in the literature of the day. Accusing this modernist group of poetic exhibitionism, obscurity, and generally a lack of good sense and taste, Castilho attacked the modernist poets for instigating the intellectual revolution. In response, Antero published Bom Senso e Bom Gosto, A Dignidade das Letras and Literaturas Oficiais in which he defended their independence, pointing to the mission of poets in an era of great transformation, the necessity of being the messengers of the great ideological questions of the day, and included the ridiculousness and insignificance of Castilho's style of poetry under the circumstances. This gave rise to the 1865 controversy known as the "Coimbra Question", and his groups reference as the 70s Generation which opposed the ultra-romantic group of António Feliciano de Castilho.
He then traveled, engaged in political and socialist agitation, and found his way through a series of disappointments to the mild pessimism.
He briefly went to the United States, but returned to Lisbon in 1868, where he formed Cenáculo, along with Eça de Queirós, Guerra Junqueiro and Ramalho Ortigão; a intellectual group of anarchists against many of the political, social and intellectual conventions of the day.
Paradoxically, he was a founder of the Partido Socialista Português (Portuguese Socialist Party). In 1869, he founded the newspaper, A República - Jornal da Democracia Portuguesa with Oliveira Martins, and in 1872, along with José Fontana, he began to edit the magazine O Pensamento Social.
n 1873, he inherited a sizable amount of money, which allowed him to live reasonably. Owing to tuberculosis in the following year, he rested, but returned to re-edit his Odes Modernas. He moved to Oporto in 1879, and in 1886 he published his best poetic work, Sonetos Completos, which included many passages considered autobiographical and symbolistic.
Throughout his life Antero had oscillated between pessimism and depression; afflicted with what have been Bipolar Disorder, at the time of his last trip to Lisbon he was in a state of permanent depression, which was also accentuated by spinal disease. After one month in Lisbon, around June 1891, he returned once more to Ponta Delgada, eventually committing suicide on 11 September 1891, with two gunshots through the mouth, taken on the bunk of a local garden park: "Of all things, the worst is having been born", he wrote in a poem.
Adapted from Wikipedia
In this statue made by Salvador Barata Feyo the poet is depicted standing posing for their great work, covered with the mantle which descends to the feet with his face unshaven.
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