Portuguese school literature II: Quental’s depression and Verde’s hatred for cities.

Yesterday I spoke about a poet so bad that he made Coca-cola illegal in Portugal, but today I will talk about another two poets disliked by portuguese students: Antero de Quental (1842-1891) and Cesário Verde (1855-1886).

Antero, born in the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, where the only interesting things are cows and lakes, however, he was lucky enough to live in Coimbra (portuguese city known for having a university) and study literature, otherwise he would be taking care of cows in front of a lake.

His poems are about the same thing: depression, and are wrote in the same format, a format known as soneto , here is a [example](https://aviagemdosargonautas.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/evoluc3a7c3a3o.jpg) of a soneto wrote by Quental himself.

I remember studying his poetry and being able to predict how the next soneto would look like, I swear its the same thing over and over again and in the same format, this man deserves the award for less original writer of all time.

Cesário was born in Lisbon, but he lived on the exact same place as me (Oeiras), he was known for his hatred of cities, so when one day a newspaper asked him to write a huge poem (because in 1880 newspaper published poetry instead of celebrity gossip) he accepted and that was how O sentimento de um occidental was born, a very bad poem that talks about rotten fish and smog.

He also wrote other poems about how green is Oeiras (where he lived) and as someone who lives at Oeiras I agree with him, this is very green and beautiful but students dont care.

When I was in class one day we went to our school library to hear a random old man talk give a one-hour lecture about Cesário Verde’s poems, almost fell asleep that morning of how boring it was.

by CRNXD38