ANTONIO FELICIANO DE CASTILHO (1847-74)

Poet and translator, a central figure in the Portuguese Romantic movement.

Although blind from childhood, he became a classical scholar and at the age of 16 published a prolific series of poems, translations, and pedagogical works.

Castilho´s literary life may be divided into two phases, the midpoint occurring during the revolutionar period of the late 1840s. During the first he published a series of poems that try to assimilate current romantic trends while continuing to be guided by a basically neoclassical spirit. These poems include Cartas de Eco e Narciso (1821), Primavera (1822), Amor e Melancolia (1828), A Noite do Castelo (1836) and Ciúmes de Bardo (1838), all but the first of which were subsequently revised.

With the publication of his Obras Completas in 1837, Castilho gained recognition and became a literary figure in LIsbon. In the same year he was offered the directorship of an important journal O Panorama and in 1838 he began to collaborate with Almeida Garrett, the leading Portuguese Romantic poet, in the revival of national theatre.

His romantic narratives of the lives of Portuguese medieval heroes, Quadros Históricos de Portugal, were begun in 1838 and in 1842 he took charge of the Revista Universal Lisbonense, a major cultural review.

The later phase of Castilho´s career began after his return from a two-year residence in the Azores (approximately 1848-50) where he had promoted agriculture as a means of social reform.

His acceptance of Romanticism was never wholehearted. Scholarly rather than imaginative he began to return to a genteel tradionalism having much in common with the earlier generation of Portuguese arcadian poets.

His personal prestige was at its height and his lifeless style so dominated literary taste that it brought about a rebellion from the younger generation of writers. The attack against Castilho came from the young poet Antero de Quental, who wrote the pamphlet "Bom Senso e Bom Gôsto" (1866; "Good Sense and Good Taste") in reply to Castilho´s criticism of certain younger writers. This riposte gave rise to one of the most celebrated polemics in Portuguese literature, the questâo Coimbra which eventually dethroned Castilho as literary dictator.

While continuing in several journalistic ventures, Castilho undertook several translations of Greek and Latin authors, having already concluded the arcadian poet Manuel Bocage´s translation of Ovid´s Metamorphoses (1841). In 1867 the last of these appeared (Virgil´s Geórgicas) and he moved to theatrical works by Molière, Shakespeare and Goethe. In the 1870s he was engaged to do a translation of Don Quixote but it was uncompleted at his death.