O Ano de 1919

Abstract

It is not intended to characterize literarily the year of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen's birth, which was also that of her friend Jorge de Sena, a unique and topping personality of Portuguese culture. The objective is - in addition to the obligatory academic painting of a local color that makes feel the artistic climate of the epoch, full of contradictions and aporias - to equate some fundamental ideas that are born in that same year abroad with the critical thinking of T. S. Eliot and deepen with the poetic theory of Roman Jakobson and the Russian formalists, influenced by the intentional phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In particular, despite the reigning historicist background, the unprecedented articulation between the trans-historicity of the literary phenomenon and its intrinsic specificity, that the generation of Cadernos de Poesia - to which these two figures will belong when they reach adulthood, during II Great War and post-war - will integrate dialectically in an ethical conception of the word's commitment to human dignity without sacrificing its aesthetic dignity. This integration is the hallmark of a Third Modernism, still poorly understood as such, whose doctrinal and theoretical embryo dates from 1919 and which continues the paths opened by the modernists of Orpheu, The Egoist and Presença.