Published in Paris, under anonymity, it appeared in 1825, in the Livraria Nacional Estrangeira, a poem in verse that today, in 2025, two hundred years after its first edition, few remember. The celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Luís de Camões overshadowed, or were not conducive to, the summoning of Almeida Garrett (1799-1854), the introducer of Romanticism in Portugal and who in this poem of an “absolutely new nature”, opened our literature to the winds of romantic renewal.
Winds that, let’s say, had been blowing since the last quarter of the 18th century. Baudelaire defined romantic art: a new way of feeling. Garrett, in exile in 1823, at the time of Vilafrancada and the counter-revolution, was an attentive reader of this new literature. Understand that the language and themes have changed. In this Europe of the Schlegell brothers and Goethe, of Novalis and Holderlin, of Madame De Stael, inspired by this quarrel of Moderns against Ancients, in an effort to wrest from the classical corset of the sonnet and the inflexible meter (the decasyllable) the language of poetry, which was now wanted to be closer to popular heritage, to street diction, is completely different. Aware of the change taking place, he understands that Europe, culturally guided by that liberal France, that of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, of Vigny and Lamartine, exalts the primacy of the individual, its fundamental freedom and, of course, popular traditions, nationalities. Romanticism is an unstoppable movement to affirm the aestheticism of each country, the so-called aesthetic nationalism. France is the model: the heroic homeland born of the victory of 1789, the heritage of the Enlightenment and the spirit of the Encyclopedia and now put into perspective by Delacroix. Garrett, trained in Arcadianism, now investigates the primitive sources: from 1819, the year in which he published his Portrait of Venus and defends him, alone, in court (born “The Divine”), to his Camões of 1825 covers all the distance that separates a faithful reader of Horace from a passionate follower of Hugo.
Romanticism: this vogue (or wave) that, from Walter Scott and Coleridge, to Byron and Keats, from Shelley to Bram Stoker (Irish, the creator of Dracula), is the time of our Almeida Garrett, baptized João da Silva Leitão, what do you tell us today? To students who read our romantic drama, the Friar Luís de Sousa (1846), what does Garrett tell them? If the renewer of our language with the Travels in My Land (which left the curricula more than 30 years ago!!) is one of the greatest exponents of this social and political, literary and aesthetic school that, when all things considered, was essential for what happened in poetry worldwide (Octavio Paz did not hesitate to consider modernism an extension of romanticism, a system that would continue to be alive long after the realist reaction), how can we read this forgotten Garrett again? In the year of (poor) celebration of the author of The LusíadasGarrett was not remembered… But his poem in new verse, with that “Warning” where he says “I consulted neither Horace nor Aristotle; but I was insensibly deposed the heart and feelings of nature, other than by the calculations of art and combined operations of the spirit.”; In this prologue where “Vate Christian” is presented who makes “Christian verses”, Garrett more than followed Byron of Child Harold and he also claimed not to “ape” the French.