António Pereira Nobre was a Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

. He died of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

 in Foz do Douro, Porto, in 1900, after trying to recover in a number of places. His masterpiece Só

Só

Só , published in Paris in 1892, is a collection of poems by the Portuguese poet António Nobre. It is the only work of his that appeared in his lifetime, and a classic of Portuguese literature....

 (Paris, 1892), was the only book he published.

Northern Portugal

Nobre was a member of a wealthy family. He was born in Oporto, and spent his childhood in Trás-os-Montes

Trás-os-Montes (region)

Trás-os-Montes was one of the 13 regions of continental Portugal identified by geographer Amorim Girão, in a study published between 1927 and 1930.Together with Alto Douro it formed Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro Province.- See also :...

 and in Póvoa de Varzim

Póvoa de Varzim

Póvoa de Varzim is a Portuguese city in the Norte Region and sub-region of Greater Porto, with a 2011 estimated population of 63,364. According to the 2001 census, there were 63,470 inhabitants with 42,396 living in the city proper. The urban area expanded, southwards, to Vila do Conde, and there...

.

Coimbra

He studied law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

 unsuccessfully at the University of Coimbra from 1888 to 1890 when he dropped out. As a student in Coimbra

Coimbra

Coimbra is a city in the municipality of Coimbra in Portugal. Although it served as the nation's capital during the High Middle Ages, it is better-known for its university, the University of Coimbra, which is one of the oldest in Europe and the oldest academic institution in the...

, and according to his own words, he only felt at ease in his "tower" (referring to the Torre de Anto - Anto Tower, in upper Coimbra, where he lived) during the "sinister period" he spent studying law at the University of Coimbra. An unknown fiancée, more fictitious than concrete; a friend - Alberto de Oliveira, and a brief intervention in the literary life, through some magazines, did not conciliate him with the academic city of Coimbra where this predestined poet flunked twice.

Paris

He went to Paris where he took a degree in political science

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques

École Libre des Sciences Politiques

École Libre des Sciences Politiques , often referred to as the École des Sciences Politiques or simply Sciences Po was created in Paris in February 1872 by a group of European intellectuals, politicians and businessmen, which included Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Pierre Paul...

. There he contacted with the French coeval poetry - he meet Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

 and Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

, among others. He also meet the famous Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz in Paris, who was a Portuguese diplomat in the city. It was from 1890 to 1895, that Nobre studied political science in Paris, where he was influenced by the French Symbolist poets, and was there that he wrote the greater part of the only book he published.

The Paris exile, sad by his own words ("poor Lusitanian, the wretched", lost in the crowd that does not know him), was not a time for happiness. The aristocratic shutting up caused nausea or indifference. Frustrated and always marginal experiences made him bitter. He was far from the sweat and from all sorts of fraternity, from desire and hate, and from the wailing of the breed, a childlike, lost, instinctive and princely life, a souvenir of the sweet old landscape that memory seems to encourage. In his tender but never rhetorical mourning Nobre manifests himself and mourns over himself as a doomed poet, with a hard soul and a maiden's heart, which carried the sponge of gall in former processions.

Style, work and last days

His verse marked a departure from objective realism and social commitment to subjective lyricism and an aesthetic point of view. The lack of means aggravated by his father's death, made him morbidly reject the present and the future, following a pessimistic romantic attitude that led him to denounce his tedium. However excessive, this is a controlled attitude, due to a clear aesthetic mind and a real sense of ridicule. He learned the colloquial tone from Almeida Garrett

Almeida Garrett

João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, Viscount of Almeida Garrett was a Portuguese poet, playwright, novelist and politician. He is considered to be the introducer of the Romanticism in Portugal, with the epic poem Camões, based on the life of Luís de Camões...

 and Júlio Dinis

Júlio Dinis

Júlio Dinis, pseudonym of Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho was a Portuguese doctor and writer.Júlio Dinis died at the young age of 31 of tuberculosis, and some of its works were published posthumously...

, and also from Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...

, but he exceeded them all in the peculiar compromise between irony and a refined puerility, a fountain of happiness because it represents a return to his happiest of times - a kingdom of his own from where he resuscitates characters and enchanted places, manipulating, as a virtuoso of nostalgia, the picturesque of popular festivals and of fishermen, the simple magic of toponyms and the language of the people.

In his prescience of pain, in his spiritual anticipation of disease and of agony, in his taste for sadness, in his unmeasured pride of isolation, António (from Torre de Anto, at the centre of old Coimbra where the poet lived an enchanted life, everywhere writing his mythical and literary name: Anto) keeps an artist’s composure, always expressing the cult of the aesthetic life and of the elegant personality. In his courtship of death (to whose imminent threat he would later answer with dignity), he takes his spiritual dandyism to extremes, like in the “Balada do Caixão.” His poetry translates the lack of a total maturation, an adolescent “angelism” present in fabulous confirmations: he is “the moon”, “the saint”, “the snake”, “the sorcerer”, “the afflicted”, “the inspired”, “the unprecedented”, “the medium”, “the bizarre”, “the fool”, “the nauseated”, “the tortured”, “D. Enguiço”, “a supernatural poet.”

Narcissus in permanent soliloquy, whether he writes verses of nostalgia to Manuel or speaks to his own pipe - António Nobre (A. N.) makes poetry out of the real, he covers what is prosaic with a soft mantle of legend (“My neighbour is a carpenter/he is a second-hand trader of Mrs. Death”) and creates, with a rare balance between intuition and critique, his familiar “fantastic” (“When the Moon, a beautiful milkmaid/goes deliver milk at the houses of Infinity”). His catholic imaginary world is the same as in a fairy tale, a crib of simple words but with an imaginative audacity in the scheming of those words that separate him from the consecrated lyrical language. His power of “invention” comes forth in the inspired, yet conscious, use of the verbal material (“Moons of Summer! Black moons of velvet!” or “The Abbey of my past”). Between the Garrettian and the symbolic aesthetic, the most personal and revealing feature of his vocabulary is naturally - even for his longing for the childhood aesthetical retrieval -, the diminutive. A man of sensibility rather than of reflection, he took from the French symbolism, whose mystery and deep sense he could never penetrate, the repelling of oratory and of formal procedures - the original imagery (“Trás-os-Montes of water”, “slaughter house of the planets”), the cult of synaesthesia, the rhythmic freedom, the musical research. A. N. had a very thick ear. All his poetry is rigorously written to be heard, full of parallelisms, of melodic repetitions, of onomatopoeias, extremely malleable. Its syllabic division depends on the rhythm that obeys to feeling. However, the images or the words of his sentences rarely have the precious touch of the symbolic jewellery. Evidently, in “Poentes de França”, the planets come drink in silver chalices in the “tavern of sunset”; however, his transfiguration of reality almost always obeys not to a purpose of sumptuous embellishment, like in Eugénio de Castro

Eugénio de Castro

Eugénio de Castro e Almeida was a Portuguese writer and a poet. He was a professor at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Coimbra and attended Escola Normal Superior in the same university....

, but to an essentially affectionate eager desire of an intimism of things (“the skinny and hunchbacked poplars”, etc).

António Nobre died of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

 in Foz do Douro, Porto

Porto

Porto , also known as Oporto in English, is the second largest city in Portugal and one of the major urban areas in the Iberian Peninsula. Its administrative limits include a population of 237,559 inhabitants distributed within 15 civil parishes...

, in 18 March 1900, after trying to recover in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

, Madeira

Madeira

Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

 and New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.

Other than Só

Só

Só , published in Paris in 1892, is a collection of poems by the Portuguese poet António Nobre. It is the only work of his that appeared in his lifetime, and a classic of Portuguese literature....

(Paris, 1892) two other posthumous works were published: Despedidas (1st edition, 1902), with a fragment from O Desejado, and Primeiros Versos (1st edition, 1921). António Nobre's correspondence is reunited in several volumes: Cartas Inéditas a A.N., with an introduction and notes by A. Casais Monteiro, Cartas e Bilhetes-Postais a Justino de Montalvão with a foreword and notes by Alberto de Serpa, Porto, 1956; Correspondência, with an introduction and notes by Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon, 1967 (a compilation of 244 letters, 56 of which unpublished).