Sophia de Mello Breyner
Sophia de Mello Breyner is a poet whose work has a special relationship with Nature. Through pure realism and the four essential elements: water, air, fire and earth, the writer places the landscape at the center of her poetry, describing it as a pure and perfect place. On the contrary, it attributes a negative connotation to the city, describing it as a false paradise of artificiality and impurity.
José Saramago
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, José Saramago emerges as a revolutionary of the Portuguese language, since he wrote as if he were telling a story. The writer put disorder in his writing with the absence of dashes at the beginning of the dialogues and the unconventional placement of periods and commas. These lasts 2 marks, which he identified as “pauses”, were the only punctuation he used.
Its complexity and uniqueness were also evident in its ability to combine the past with the present, fiction with history, and imagination with science. Throughout his work, Saramago demonstrates an evident humanistic and humanitarian character.
Florbela Espanca
Florbela Espanca’s (1894-1930) dramatic and emotional poetry reflected the sadness and bitterness of her life, which led her to suicide at the age of 36. Love is the central theme of his work, from which feelings such as loneliness, sadness and “saudade” diverge.
She was one of the first feminists in Portugal, since she stimulated the women’s literary emancipation movement using the eroticism in her writing. Her constant egocentrism is observed in this theme when she assumes herself as a powerful and dominant woman, in contrast to the conventional image of the woman of that time.
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was one of the great drivers of modernism in Portugal. His artistic creation was marked by the creation of several heteronyms, each one with a different personality.
The most important were Alberto Caeiro, the peasant without studies, simple writing and a taste for nature and sensations; Álvaro de Campos, considered Fernando Pessoa’s alter ego, graduated in engineering and educated in English and with three phases throughout the work: decadent, progressive and pessimistic; and Ricardo Reis, a believer in the epicurean doctrine and in reason superior to passion.