page_title: Antero de Quental
section_title: Coimbra years
hierarchical_section_title: Antero de Quental / Biography / Coimbra years
caption_attribution_description: Português: Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, Retrato de Antero de Quental, 1889
context_page_description: Antero Tarquínio de Quental was a Portuguese poet, philosopher, and writer whose works became a milestone in the Portuguese language alongside those of Camões, Bocage, and Fernando Pessoa.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: A late portrait of Antero de Quental by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro
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