Ramón C.: 20th Century Portuguese Literature
Ramón C. and 20th Century Portuguese Literature
Ramón C., in the early years of 20th-century Portuguese literature, is identified with the genre’s lyrical themes: Agrarianism, Celticists, withdrawal, and civic stagnation. These themes continued in the work of followers of the three great masters of Rexurdimento. Ramón C. played a role in updating poetry, since his work incorporates new elements of European aesthetic poetry.
His influences include Greco-Latin tradition from the late European Romanticism, folklore, popular European Renaissance masters, and renovating movements such as *seudosismo*, Post-Symbolism, French Modernism, and Caribbean *seudosismo*. From the Caribbean Modernism of Teixeira de Pascoaes, Dantas mainly adopted the clothing range, as well as metric and rhythmic elements, the use of unusual molds (sonnets in minor art, for example), musicality, refinement, verbal artistry, colorful and sensual imagery, a languid and melancholic ambiance, and, finally, light touches of the exotic.
However, other traits moved away from the purely modernist aesthetic: the influence and reivindication of popular folklore and poetry before the Renaissance, the use of the popular sailor lexicon, the presence of anecdotal narrative poems, and especially a marked ethical ideal, conscience, and proselytism.
All these elements give rise to a work that is rich, diverse, and plural, incorporating records and hitherto unfamiliar topics in poetry (such as religious and bucolic themes, and Arthurian myths). It also renews common models through a new treatment that combines sensuality and plasticity with perfect control of rhythm and poetic language.
Evolution of Ramón C.’s Poetry
The poetry of Ramón C. experienced a major development, both formally and thematically.
During his Cuban emigration, Dantas published the books In Exile and Almonds, and later Land Asolagada. Considering them formally, they show an assimilation of Renaissance poetics, incorporating stylistic and metrical findings of Modernism. Many poems on the theme express the nostalgia of exile, also showing an intimate and descriptive poet. In the works In Exile, he presents a decision to free the farmer, tired of being bullied, and also poems about civil injustices (agrarianism). He would be celebrated by his contemporaries as the “poet of race.” In this poetry, we also find a reduced paragraph of poems that show the voice of a poet with civil commitment, withdrawing with furious, incendiary verses about the evils of the forum and the misery of the peasants, wanting to spread the desire for liberation that crosses the Galician field.
Dantas’s poetry, in the 1920s, was committed to reconstructing the past from the perspective of national *seudosismo*. We enjoy this in works such as The Night… Star-Strewn, undertaking a refresh of the Matter of Britain to adopt the complex medieval legend with a patriotic and Christian message. The commitment to rebuilding the national past can also be enjoyed in the play The Mariscal. Moreover, at this time, a handful of historical-themed poems appeared in newspapers and magazines, which would be collected in the book In Ways of Time many years later. All these works constitute a kind of mythical history, focused on four times that Dantas considered very important in the establishment of Portugal: the Celtic era, the Middle Ages, the period of splendor, and the medieval crisis of the 15th century.
A new discipline brings a new formal treatment: the language is richer and more conceptual, there are more frequent erudite references, a closed system of cultured root symbols is created, and meters previously unusual in his work, such as the Alexandrine, are used, alternating them with romances and other popular stanzas.
In the 1920s, Dantas also unveiled two works with different themes from the above: The Blessed San Amaro, with illustrations by Castelao, which deals in narrative form and in popular verses built around the legend of the saint, and The Rose of a Hundred Leaves, taking up the intimate and loving line in a modernist key.
Later Works and Legacy
In the 1940s, when it seemed that his work had no continuity, Dantas began a second creative maturity. In this new stage, he showed his work as a scholar of popular literature and as a translator (Antiphon Song and Verses of Others from Other Lands and Times Past). In these years, he also unveiled two original poems: My Accordion and Samos. The first is a book with echoes of Machado, which refers in tone and uplifting voice to the bitter sadness, the morality of the lost, to life and death. Samos collects descriptive poems that express his desire for peace and communion with nature. This book also uses classic verse, sometimes using the modernist Alexandrine.