ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on mapping the Portuguese readings that inform and sustain the poetry of the first modernism, discerning which among those poets were the ones who, for their patent or latent importance. Another of the great poets of the nineteenth century, and indeed of all Portuguese literature, acknowledged by modernists as a precursor, is Cesario Verde. It seems absurd to consider that poets of a certain generation appear spontaneously without the support of a tradition which gives meaning to what they wish to put into practice, even when they intend to present themselves as bringers of the new, demolishing their older contemporaries and their predecessors. Poetic motifs and issues, such as those mentioned above, as well as Almeida Garrett's decisive contribution to a fluid style that owes much to orality and the rhythms of folk poetry, may well be the reason for Pessoa's manifest interest in his work.
