Florbela Espanca

Poet and short story writer. After completing his secondary studies in Évora, he attended the Faculty of Law in Lisbon. The critical approach to his poetic work, marked by passionate exaltation, has remained overly indebted to correlations, more or less implicit, established between his troubled biographical trajectory – a romantically and socially unsuccessful existence that would culminate in suicide at the age of 36 – and a feminine, egotistical, and sentimental poetic voice, singularly isolated in the literary context of the first decades of the century. Indeed, a more impartial reading of her compositions, among which are some of the most beautiful sonnets in the Portuguese language, allows us to position her either within the matrix of fin-de-siècle poetry that, formally, crosses decadentist, symbolist (there are several references in her poetry to symbolist authors) and neo-romantic characteristics (showing admiration for certain authors of the third romantic generation, such as Antero de Quental), "in the manner of an epigone of António Nobre" (cf. PEREIRA, José Augusto Seabra - preface to Obras Completas de Florbela Espanca, vol. I, Poesia, Lisboa, D. Quixote, 1985, p. IV), or, also, by the way in which the experience of love promotes, at every step, a mythification of the self, in the vein of certain authors of early modernism such as Sá-Carneiro, Alfredo Guisado or António Botto. Through another avenue, that of mystical literature, Florbela Espanca consciously reconnects ("Soror Saudade") with the tradition of cloistered women's literature which, during its period of greatest flourishing, had received a conceptist mark, maintained in Florbela's poetics by a certain propensity for exploring the antitheses death/life, love/pain, truth/deception. The image of the woman suffering from romantic illusion to illusion, reiterating her fate to the point of despair, giving expression to an existence irremediably undermined by anxiety and incomprehension, ended up, in the broader reception of her poetry, overshadowing other equally pertinent thematic connections, such as the pain of thinking and the aspiration to simplicity ("If only I could return to the innocence / Of raw, healthy, inanimate things, / To strip away vain pride, incoherence: / - Torn cloaks of mutilated statues!" ("Non-Being"); or the way in which the search for love essentially becomes a search for herself through the shards of a being who does not know how to be alone: ​​"Oh, the dreadful evil of being alone! / Oh, the dreadful and atrocious evil of carrying / So many laughing souls inside mine!" ("Madness", in Sonnets). Florbela Espanca.