ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that it seems absurd to consider that poets of a certain generation appear spontaneously without the support of a tradition. It presents Maria Helena Vieira da Silva as one of the main figures of the Jeune Ecole de Paris, a school that included diverse artists who in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s challenged the foundations of abstraction, without rejecting its principles. The book shows that in Portugal some of the writers and artists associated with the modernist magazines, Orpheu and Portugal Futurista, contributed significantly to the attitude of mind that provided the later totalitarian regime in Portugal with its initial cultural aura. It examines a central issue of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in light of its influence on Portuguese poetry in the modernist period.
