Fernando Pessoa and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: the “Epic of the Negative” versus the Unity

Abstract

Abstract: Fernando Pessoa’s presence, in whatever way it existed, is unquestionable and inseparable from the establishment of Portuguese Modernism and its modernity. Launched in Lusitanian lands, the modernity will find a safe ground to be strengthened in the poetry of the great poets who idealized the Cadernos de Poesia, published in 1940. It’s in them that Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen makes her debut and, later, in 1944, publishes her first book. The writers of the 1940s still find reverberating Pessoa and presence’s generation, and with it, it will maintain an intense poetic dialogue. In the books published by Sophia until the 60s, the dialogue with the Pessoan sphynx isn’t exactly explicit, but rather is present in its diction and in the use of free verse, characteristics that bring it closer to the odes of the heteronymous Álvaro de Campos. Later, with Livro Sexto, in 1962, the dialogue becomes more evident and even more visible, with several poems evoking Pessoa. But if in this one the conscious of modernity establishes a negativity and an epic of the night, Sophia’s poems bring light, unity, a full encounter with the real, completeness, however, don’t leave absent the tragic feeling of a “divided time”.