ABSTRACT
An argument that seemed conclusive to Sigmund Freud, but not to his friends, so stubborn in their desire for the eternal duration of what had seduced them with its beauty, and in their bitterness over its decay, fading, disappearance. The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving the sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience’. Through Ricardo Reis, a neoclassical theory, dreamed up one evening in reaction to the excesses of modernism, was transformed into poems where beauty and transience are interwoven in crystalline verses that seem to have no other theme. Like Freud, Reis had shifted the focus of his attention from the things in which beauty manifests itself to the mind which recognizes and contemplates that beauty, and whose state becomes essential to the very possibility of the aesthetic experience.
