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How did Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage foreshadow Portuguese Romanticism?
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Portuguese literature
Portrait of poet and writer Fernando Pessoa on Portuguese currency.
Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage is recognized as a precursor to the Romantic spirit in Portuguese literature. Although he operated within the Neoclassical framework of the 18th-century Nova Arcádia, his work diverged from the movement's formal constraints in ways that anticipated Romanticism.21
Bocage foreshadowed the Romantic movement through several key characteristics in his poetry:
- Intensely Personal Expression: He moved away from the detached, objective style of his contemporaries, favoring an intensely personal accent that prioritized individual emotion.2
- Emotional Intensity: His work often featured a frequent violence of expression, signaling a departure from the restraint typical of Neoclassicism.2
- Thematic Obsession: He displayed a self-dramatizing obsession with themes of fate and death, which would become central tenets of the later Romantic aesthetic.2
By infusing his verse with these subjective and dramatic qualities, Bocage bridged the gap between the rigid structures of the 18th century and the emotional freedom that would define the 19th-century Romantic renewal in Portugal.23