🇵🇹 Almeida Garrett

Almeida Garrett was born in Porto on February 4, 1799, into a comfortable family. The Napoleonic invasions of Portugal disrupted his childhood; the family spent years in the Azores. He went on to study law at the University of Coimbra, graduating in 1820, and was already known there as a playwright and a passionate liberal at a time when liberalism was dangerous.

Portuguese politics in these years swung violently between liberal constitutionalism and absolutist reaction. Garrett's liberal commitments forced him into exile, first in 1823 and again later, mostly in England and France. Exile was painful but formative. In England especially he absorbed the European Romantic movement, the new interest in national history, folk traditions, and individual feeling, and he resolved to bring it to Portuguese literature.

He did so first as a poet. From exile he published two long narrative poems, Camoes (1825) and Dona Branca (1826), which are usually taken as the formal beginning of Romanticism in Portuguese. Significantly, his Camoes made the suffering national poet a Romantic hero, linking the new movement directly to Portugal's own past rather than simply importing a foreign fashion.

Garrett also turned to the people's own voice. He collected and reworked traditional Portuguese ballads and folk poetry in the volumes of Romanceiro, an act of literary nationalism that treated popular oral tradition as a serious cultural inheritance. It was part of the same impulse that drove Romantics across Europe to gather the songs and tales of their nations.

When the liberals secured power, Garrett returned and threw himself into public life. He entered Parliament in 1837 and became one of the great orators of his age. The government asked him to design a national theatre, and he discovered that he had to invent nearly everything at once: the playhouse, a national conservatory to train actors, an organization to commission plays, and the plays themselves, since the Portuguese stage had been moribund for generations.

His answer as a dramatist was a series of historical prose plays drawn from Portuguese history. The greatest of them is Frei Luis de Sousa (1843), a tense domestic tragedy set against the loss of Portuguese independence to Spain, widely regarded as the finest Portuguese play of the nineteenth century. With it, Garrett did not just write a masterpiece; he proved the new national theatre could produce one.

Late in his career he published Viagens na Minha Terra, Travels in My Homeland (1846), a strange, brilliant hybrid of travelogue, novel, essay, and digression. Ostensibly an account of a journey from Lisbon to Santarem, it ranges freely over Portuguese society, history, and the author's own ironic mind, and it is now considered one of the founding works of modern Portuguese prose.

Garrett was made a viscount and continued to combine literature with statesmanship until his death in Lisbon on December 9, 1854. He had set out to give Portugal a modern literary culture: a Romanticism rooted in its own history, a respected national theatre, a renewed prose. By the time he died, those things existed, and the generation of Eca de Queiros and Antero de Quental could build on the foundation he had laid.