Teixeira de Pascoaes (Portugal) 1877-1952

Teixeira de Pascoaes (Portugal)

1877-1952

 

Born Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos in Amarante, Portugal on November 2, 1877, the poet who later used the name Teixeira de Pascoaes, grew up in the family villa in Serra do Marão, where farmed and wrote poetry.

      As a young man he graduated from law school in 1901, but practiced law for only 10 years. Beginning in in 1895 he published poetry, in Embiões, followed by two the two-volume collection Belo in 1896 and 1897.

     With António Sérgio and Raul Procença he became one of the leaders of the poetry movement Renascença Portuguesa, which he helped to found in 1910. With Leonardo Coimbra and Jaime Cortesão, Teixeira de Pascoaes founded the magazine A Águia, devoted to that movement.

     Over the next several decades, the poet continued to exert an enormous influence over Portuguese poetry as he honed, in particular, the poetic form of the saudade, a word that suggests a sadness for the abscence of those one loves. Indeed his aesthetics ultimately came to be at the heart of the Saudosismo movement which led, in part, to what is generally termed as the Portuguese Renaissance.

     A highly religious man, Teixeira de Pascoaes also wrote, with novelist Raul Brandão a play about Christ, along with fictional biographies of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome. He also wrote more standard biographies of Camilo Castelo Branco and Napoleon. In 1915 he penned his popular boook, The Art of Being Portuguese. 

     The poet died in 1952.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Embriões (1895); Belo 1 (1896); Belo II (1897); À minha alma (1898); Sempre (1909, 1902); Terra Proibida (1899); À fortune (1901); Jesús e pan (1903); Vida Etérea (1906); As Sombras (1907); Senhora da noite (1909); Marânus (1911); Regresso ao Paraíso (1912); Elegias (1912); Cantos idecisos (1921); À elegy do amor (1924); About pobre ter (1924); D. Carlos (1925); Cânticos (1925); Versos pobres (1949); Últimos Versos (1953)