Carlos Maria de Araújo

Poet. He attended the Faculties of Arts and Law in Lisbon, but in 1949 he left Portugal and never returned. He lived in Switzerland, England, and Brazil. In the latter country, he worked in journalism and radio. His life, agitated and tumultuous, full of tragic and picaresque incidents, culminated in a painful and moving agony of several years, during which his fascinating figure became, beyond all miseries, an admirable poet of lucid dignity. According to Jorge de Sena, «his poetry is certainly among the purest and most remarkable in Portuguese poetry, which still largely ignores him. Extremely stripped-down and dense poetry, of intense formal severity and vigorous emotion contained in a lapidary expression, it is truly the work of an officiant of darkness, of those shadows that so terribly cover life and the world. In its short and syncopated rhythms, beneath which, however, a nearly sentimental simplicity flows hidden, this poetry signifies, like few recent works, a brilliant definition of Portuguese exile, in what it has of ambiguous and frustrated, as well as in what, within it, resists everything, even the fear that the verse must be so in the poet's mouth.»