Siglo de Oro

The Spaniards invented the concept of the "Siglo de Oro" to designate their most glorious cultural period (which in fact runs over almost two centuries, the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth) whose greatest figures were writers like Cervantes or Lope de Vega, poets like Quevedo, Gongora or San Juan de la Cruz and painters like Velazquez or Murillo. In Portugal, we are now also inventing our own "Século de Ouro", in this case the twentieth century when several generations of poets raised the level of Portuguese literature to a very great height. Everybody knows Fernando Pessoa, the greatest portuguese poet of the century and, with Luis de Camões, one of the greatest ever; but by no means was he the only extraordinary poet to appear in Portugal: Jorge de Sena, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Alexandre O'Neill, the incomparable Herberto Helder, to name just a few of my favorites (and there are many others) will surely have their place in the literary canon of the century. Examples to follow in the next posts.