9 - Almeida Garrett: Founder of Modern Portuguese Literature

Summary

João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett (1799–1854) is one of the undisputed founders of Portuguese Romanticism and one of the earliest Portuguese writers to have a typically modern concept of the intellectual and of his political and civic role. His thorough classical training, under the guidance of his uncle, is visible in much of his work which, as a whole, contains clear evidence of the possibilities for frequently successful cross-over and even reconciliation of the classical and Romantic poles.

In 1816 he matriculated at Coimbra University, and immediately revealed those two aspects of his activities which would persist throughout his life: the social and political, and the aesthetic and literary. His first book, O Retrato de Vénus (Portrait of Venus) was published in 1821, the year he took his degree and entered public service. But almost immediately, in 1823, following an absolutist coup d’état, he had to leave the country, opting for periods of exile in England and in France until the early 1830s, when he joined the Liberal expeditionary force under Prince Pedro. Exile had a profound effect on him, deepening his liberalism and giving him first-hand knowledge of the complex literary and aesthetic movements occurring in Europe, which was by now a Romantic Europe, and of some of the more significant works that they gave rise to. It was in this spirit that Garrett wrote the two narrative poems generally considered to be the earliest manifestations of a Romantic aesthetic in Portugal, Camões (1825) and Dona Branca (1826). Both these books were published abroad, as was his Tratado da Educação (1829; Treatise on Education), his first volume of verse, Lírica de João Mínimo (1829; Poems of John the Least), and another poem, Adozinda (1829), his first collection of popular ballads.

Garrett's work changed as he gradually assimilated Romantic techniques. However, his early books have the qualities which were to become dominant later. They reveal the inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and literary experimentalism which remained his most distinctive characteristic. They are in every genre and have many literary aims. The lyric poetry (Poems of John the Least) has the Romantic irony and the blurring of reality and literary experience which reappears in O Arco de Sant’Ana (St Anne's Archway) and Viagens na Minha Terra (translated as Travels in My Homeland).