Portugal - 100th Anniversary - Death of Poet Antero de Quental
1991 Proof Silver 100 Escudos 32mm (18.42 grams) 0.925 Silver
Reference: KM# 664a
REPUBLICA PORTUGUESA·AÇORES 1991 INCM 100 ESC., Shield below outstretched arm, sun with rays above.
ANTERO DE QUENTAL 1842/1891, Quental facing 1/4 right.

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Antero Tarquínio de Quental (18 April 1842 - 11 September 1891) was a Portuguese poet, philosopher, and writer whose works became a milestone in the Portuguese language alongside those of Camões, Bocage, and Fernando Pessoa.

He was born in Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, into one of the oldest families of the provincial captaincy system. Antero was baptized on 2 May 1842 (few days after his birth). His parents were Fernando de Quental (Solar do Ramalho; 10 May 1814 - São Miguel Island, Ponta Delgada, Matriz; 7 March 1873), a veteran from Portuguese Liberal Wars who took part in the Landing of Mindelo and liberal in outlook, and wife Ana Guilhermina da Maia (Setúbal, 16 July 1811 - Lisbon 28 November 1876), a devout Roman Catholic. He was also a relative of Frei Bartolomeu de Quental, founder of the Congregation of the Oratory in Portugal.

In the fall of 1856 he enrolled at the University of Coimbra, where he studied Law, manifesting his first socialist ideals.

The important fact in my life during those years, and probably the most decisive one, was the sort of intellectual and moral revolution that took place within myself, as I left a poor child, pulled away from an almost patriarchal living of a remote province immersed in its placid historical slumber, towards the middle of the irrespective intellectual agitation of an urban center, where the newly found currents of the modern spirit would come more or less to recuperate. As all my Catholic and traditional upbringing swept away instantly, I fell into a state of doubt and uncertainty, as ever the more pungent as I, a naturally religious spirit, had been born to believe placidly and obey without effort to an unknown rule. I found myself without direction, a terrible state of mind, shared more or less by all those of my generation, the first one in Portugal to ever leave the old road of tradition with decision and awareness. If to this I add a burning imagination, with which Nature had blessed me in excess, the awakening of the loving passions known to early manhood, turbulence and petulance, the enthusiasms and discouragements of a meridional temperament, a lot of good faith and good will but a severe lack of patience and method, and the portrait of my qualities and defects with which I, at 18 years old, penetrated in the vast world of thought and poetry, shall be drawn.

He soon distinguished himself for his oral and written talents, as well as turbulent and eccentric nature. While in Coimbra, he founded the Sociedade do Raio, which pretended to promote literature to the masses, but which launched blasphemous challenges to religion.

In 1861, he published his first sonnets. Four years later, he published Odes Modernas, influenced by the Socialist Experimentalism of Proudhon, who championed an intellectual revolution. During that year a conflict (which would later be known as Questão Coimbrã) would develop between the traditionalist poets, championed by António Feliciano de Castilho (at that time the chief living poet of the elder generation), and a group of students (which included Antero Quintal, Teófilo Braga, Viera de Castro, Ramalho Ortigão, Guerra Junqueiro, Eça de Queiros, Oliveira Martins, Jaime Batalha Reis and Guilherme de Azevedo, among others). The contact with the nation's cultural and literary elite, the liberal and progressives in academia, did not identify with the aesthetic formalism in the literature of the day. Accusing this modernist group of poetic exhibitionism, obscurity, and generally a lack of good sense and taste, Castilho attacked the modernist poets for instigating the intellectual revolution. In response, Antero published Bom Senso e Bom Gosto, A Dignidade das Letras and Literaturas Oficiais in which he defended their independence, pointing to the mission of poets in an era of great transformation, the necessity of being the messengers of the great ideological questions of the day, and included the ridiculousness and insignificance of Castilho's style of poetry under the circumstances. This gave rise to the 1865 controversy known as the "Coimbra Question", and his groups reference as the 70s Generation which opposed the ultra-romantic group of António Feliciano de Castilho.

He then traveled, engaged in political and socialist agitation, and found his way through a series of disappointments to a mild pessimism. Strangely, it animated his latest poetry. In 1866 he went to live in Lisbon, experimented with proletarianism, worked as a typographer (at the National Press), a job that he also continued in Paris (where he went to support French workers), between January and February 1867.

He briefly went to the United States, but returned to Lisbon in 1868, where he formed Cenáculo, along with Eça de Queirós, Guerra Junqueiro and Ramalho Ortigão; an intellectual group of anarchists against many of the political, social and intellectual conventions of the day.

Paradoxically, he was a founder of the Partido Socialista Português (Portuguese Socialist Party). In 1869, he founded the newspaper, A República - Jornal da Democracia Portuguesa with Oliveira Martins, and in 1872, along with José Fontana, he began to edit the magazine O Pensamento Social. In the year of the Paris Commune (1871) he organized the famous Conferências do Casino (English: Casino Conferences), which marked the beginning of the spread of Socialist and Anarchist ideas in Portugal, distinguishing himself as a crusader for republican ideals.

In 1873, he inherited a sizable amount of money, which allowed him to live reasonably. Owing to tuberculosis in the following year, he rested, but returned to re-edit his Odes Modernas. He moved to Oporto in 1879, and in 1886 he published his best poetic work, Sonetos Completos, which included many passages considered autobiographical and symbolistic.

In 1880, he adopted the two daughters of his friend, Germano Meireles, who died in 1877. During a trip to Paris he became seriously ill, and in September 1881, under counsel from his medic, he began residing in Vila do Conde, where he remained until May 1891 (with a few intervals in the Azores and Lisbon). His time in Vila do Conde was considered by the author the best of his life. To Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos, a friend, he wrote of his need to end his poetry and begin a philosophical phase in his writing, to develop and synthesize his philosophy, adding:

Here the beaches are plentiful and beautiful, and through them I travel or stretch in the sun with a voluptuousness that only the poets and the lizards that love the sun...

In 1886, his Sonetos Completos, collected and prefaced by Oliveira Martins, were published. Between March and October 1887 he returned to the Azores, then back to Vila do Conde. The Spaniard, Miguel de Unamuno, considered them "one of the greatest examples of universal poetry, which will live as long as people have memories."

In reaction to the English Ultimatum, on 11 January 1890, he agreed to preside over the minor Liga Patriótica do Norte (English: Northern Patriotic League), although his involvement was ephemeral. When he eventually returned to Lisbon, he stayed at the home of his sister, Ana de Quental.

Throughout his life Antero had oscillated between pessimism and depression; afflicted with what might have been bipolar disorder, at the time of his last trip to Lisbon he was in a state of permanent depression, which was also accentuated by spinal disease. After one month in Lisbon he returned once again to Ponta Delgada around June 1891. On September 11 of the same year, at approximately 20:00 PM, he committed suicide by a double gunshot wound through the mouth in the bunk of a local garden park on which a wall read the word Esperança (Hope). "Of all things, the worst is having been born", he wrote in a poem.

Works

Properly speaking there has been no Portuguese literature before Antero de Quental; before that there has been either a preparation for a future literature, or foreign literature written in the Portuguese language.

- Fernando Pessoa, letter to William Bentley, 1915.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition:

Antero [stood] at the head of modern Portuguese poetry after João de Deus. His principal defect is monotony: his own self is his solitary theme, and he seldom attempts any other form of composition than the sonnet. On the other hand, few poets who have chiefly devoted themselves to this form have produced so large a proportion of really exquisite work. The comparatively few pieces in which be either forgets his doubts and inward conflicts, or succeeds in giving them an objective form, are among the most beautiful in any literature. The purely introspective sonnets are less attractive, but equally finely wrought, interesting as psychological studies, and impressive from their sincerity. His mental attitude is well described by himself as the effect of Germanism on the unprepared mind of a Southerner. He had learned much, and half-learned more, which he was unable to assimilate, and his mind became a chaos of conflicting ideas, settling down into a condition of gloomy negation, save for the one conviction of the vanity of existence, which ultimately destroyed him. A healthy participation in public affairs might have saved him, but he seemed incapable of entering upon any course that did not lead to delusion and disappointment. As a prose writer Quental displayed high talents, though he wrote little. His most important prose is the Considerações sobre a philosophia da historia literaria Portugueza, but he earned fame by his pamphlets on the Coimbra question, Bom senso e bom gosto, a letter to Castilho, and A dignidade das lettras e litteraturas officiaes.

His friend Oliveira Martins edited the Sonnets (Oporto, 1886), supplying an introductory essay; and an interesting collection of studies on the poet by the leading Portuguese writers appeared in a volume entitled Anthero de Quental. In Memoriam (Oporto, 1896). The sonnets have been translated into many languages; into English by Edgar Prestage (Anthero de Quental, Sixty-four Sonnets, London, 1894), together with a striking autobiographical letter addressed by Quental to his German translator, Dr. Storck.

Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic (Portuguese: República Portuguesa), is a country on the Iberian Peninsula, in Southwestern Europe. It is the westernmost country of mainland Europe, being bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east. The Portugal-Spain border is 1,214 km (754 mi) long and considered the longest uninterrupted border within the European Union. The republic also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira, both autonomous regions with their own regional governments.

The territory of modern Portugal has been continuously settled, invaded and fought over since prehistoric times. The Pre-Celts, Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and the Romans were followed by the invasions of the Visigothic and the Suebi Germanic peoples, who were themselves later invaded by the Moors. These Muslim peoples were eventually expelled during the Christian Reconquista. Portuguese nationality can be traced back to the creation of the First County of Portugal, in 868. In 1139, Afonso Henriques was proclaimed King of Portugal, thus firmly establishing Portuguese independence, under the Portuguese House of Burgundy.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, under the House of Aviz, which took power following the 1383-85 Crisis, Portugal expanded Western influence and established the first global empire, becoming one of the world's major economic, political and military powers. During this time, Portuguese explorers pioneered maritime exploration in the Age of Discovery, notably under royal patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator and King João II, with such notable discoveries as Vasco da Gama's sea route to India (1497-98), Pedro Álvares Cabral's discovery of Brazil (1500), and Bartolomeu Dias's reaching of the Cape of Good Hope. Portugal monopolized the spice trade during this time, under royal command of the Casa da Índia, and the Portuguese Empire expanded with military campaigns led in Asia, notably under Afonso de Albuquerque, who was known as the "Caesar of the East".

The destruction of Lisbon in a 1755 earthquake, the country's occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, the independence of Brazil (1822), and the Liberal Wars (1828-1834), all left Portugal crippled from war and diminished in its world power. After the 1910 revolution deposed the monarchy, the democratic but unstable Portuguese First Republic was established, later being superseded by the "Estado Novo" right-wing authoritarian regime. Democracy was restored after the Portuguese Colonial War and the Carnation Revolution in 1974. Shortly after, independence was granted to all its colonies and East Timor, with the exception of Macau, which was handed over to China in 1999. This marked the end of the longest-lived European colonial empire, leaving a profound cultural and architectural influence across the globe and a legacy of over 250 million Portuguese speakers today.

Portugal is a developed country with a high-income advanced economy and high living standards. It is the 5th most peaceful country in the world, maintaining a unitary semi-presidential republican form of government. It has the 18th highest Social Progress in the world, putting it ahead of other Western European countries like France, Spain and Italy. It is a member of numerous international organizations, including the United Nations, the European Union, the eurozone, OECD, NATO and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Portugal is also known for having decriminalized the usage of all common drugs in 2001, the first country in the world to do so. However, the sale and distribution of these drugs is still illegal in Portugal.