I have fever and I write: tradition and rupture in poetry of Orpheu

Abstract

Given the risks of approaching a subject so relevant to Portuguese literature, which laid the foundations of its modernity, it is important to say that Orpheu magazine, literary landmark of modernism in the land of Camões, has shaved paradigms inaugurating so many others. Thus, trying to better develop this theme, what I intend to address here may work as a kind of relativization on the manifestations of Futurism in Portugal, having as a matrix of analysis the poems of the heteronym Álvaro de Campos, “Ode Triunfal”, released in the first number of the mentioned publication; as well as the “anti-futurist” poem “No volante”, written in 1928. The curious thing is that some critics, like Fernando Cabral Martins and Leyla Perrone-Moisés, even defend that such avant-garde atmosphere of the mentioned period would reveal a confused pre-Futurism in Portugal, or a Nostalgic Futurism, in fact. Thus, highlighting the importance of Orphism as the novelty that would sketch several of the elements that would become crucial for the establishment of the Portuguese cultural identity in the course of the twentieth century to the present day, the question that most interests me when considering the proposed question is – Have Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campos practiced Futurism as proclaimed by Marinetti?