Mário de Sá-Carneiro, 100 years later

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2016v21n2p112

Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s work is still current even hundred years after his death: the modernity of his style is not limited to the modernist fashions of the time, but remains contemporary of today. This work has a large thematic coherence. Throughout his poetry, prose and drama, is repeated anew the theme of Myself/Other, the desire to achieve absolute perfection, such as Icarus, and the failure of this fulfillment. In texts like the well known «Quasi» and «7» poems as well as in the «A Confissão de Lúcio» novel, it is clearly present this wish for the merge between Myself and the Other and the impossibility of achieving it. Mário de Sá-Carneiro was, together with Fernando Pessoa, one of the founders of the Portuguese Modernism and one of the directors of «Orpheu» magazine. Both poets created several important isms for the Portuguese Modermism: paulismo, interseccionismo, sensacionismo. Nevertheless they kept themselves loyal to their own styles.