Ruy Belo: génio e sublime na poesia portuguesa contemporânea

Abstract

The Portuguese poet Ruy Belo (1933-1978) published his work in the 1960s and 1970s. He lived in Madrid between 1971 and 1977, teaching at the Complutense University. One of his best known and celebrated poems is a transcendent meditation on the meeting of Garcilaso de la Vega with Dona Isabel Freire. He has a doctorate in Canon Law in Rome, with a thesis on "Literary Fiction and Ecclesiastical Censorship", and lived through a religious crisis at the beginning of the 1960s that had repercussions on all his poetry, which has been published since then and is considered one of the most important of the 20th century in Portugal. This study aims to determine the essential aspects that give his poetry a greater dimension, of great aesthetic and emotional power, through the unification of the theories of the Genius and the Sublime, which are closely integrated in his powerful verses with a versicular slant and which come from the origins of Western poetic thought itself.