Antero de Quental


Antero Tarquínio de Quental was a Portuguese poet, philosopher, and writer whose works became a milestone in the Portuguese language alongside those of Camões, Bocage, and Fernando Pessoa.

Biography

Early life and childhood

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. Antero was baptized on 2 May 1842. His parents were Fernando de Quental, a veteran from Portuguese Liberal Wars who took part in the Landing of Mindelo and liberal in outlook, and wife Ana Guilhermina da Maia, a devout Roman Catholic. 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, 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. On writing to his old headmaster, he would say:
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 graduated from the Colégio de São Bento in 1857.

Coimbra years

In the fall of 1856 he enrolled at the University of Coimbra, where he studied Law, manifesting his first socialist ideals.
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 would develop between the traditionalist poets, championed by António Feliciano de Castilho, and a group of students. 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.

Unquiet maturity

He then traveled, engaged in political and socialist agitation, and found his way through a series of disappointments to a mild pessimism. Strangely, it animated his latest poetry. In 1866 he went to live in Lisbon, experimented with proletarianism, worked as a typographer, a job that he also continued in Paris, between January and February 1867.
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; an 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. 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. In the year of the Paris Commune he organized the famous Conferências do Casino, which marked the beginning of the spread of Socialist and Anarchist ideas in Portugal, distinguishing himself as a crusader for republican ideals.
In 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.
In 1880, he adopted the two daughters of his friend, Germano Meireles, who died in 1877. During a trip to Paris he became seriously ill, and in September 1881, under counsel from his medic, he began residing in Vila do Conde, where he remained until May 1891. His time in Vila do Conde was considered by the author the best of his life. To Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos, a friend, he wrote of his need to end his poetry and begin a philosophical phase in his writing, to develop and synthesize his philosophy, adding:
In 1886, his Sonetos Completos, collected and prefaced by Oliveira Martins, were published. Between March and October 1887 he returned to the Azores, then back to Vila do Conde. The Spaniard, Miguel de Unamuno, considered them "one of the greatest examples of universal poetry, which will live as long as people have memories."
In reaction to the English Ultimatum, on 11 January 1890, he agreed to preside over the minor Liga Patriótica do Norte, although his involvement was ephemeral. When he eventually returned to Lisbon, he stayed at the home of his sister, Ana de Quental.
Throughout his life Antero had oscillated between pessimism and depression; afflicted with what might 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 he returned once again to Ponta Delgada around June 1891. On September 11 of the same year, at approximately 20:00 PM, he committed suicide by a double gunshot wound through the mouth in the bunk of a local garden park on which a wall read the word Esperança.
"Of all things, the worst is having been born", he wrote in a poem.

Works

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition:
His friend Oliveira Martins edited the Sonnets, supplying an introductory essay; and an interesting collection of studies on the poet by the leading Portuguese writers appeared in a volume entitled Anthero de Quental. In Memoriam. The sonnets have been translated into many languages; into English by Edgar Prestage, together with a striking autobiographical letter addressed by Quental to his German translator, Dr. Storck.