Cláudio José Nunes

Poet. From a modest family of farmers, he had a rather deficient education, which was, however, overcome by a great capacity for study and an innate talent. A deputy for the Partido Progressista Histórico, his oratorical skills became famous in Parliament. As a poet, he belongs to the current of Victor Hugo's disciples of Châtiments, along with Junqueiro, Guilherme Braga, Gomes Leal, etc., both in humanitarian and social themes and in the processes he employs (antitheses, allegories, the Alexandrine verse, etc.). These pamphleteer poets, somewhat naive and inconsequential, tend to use literature as an instrument for social and moral transformation, although in the particular case of Cláudio J. Nunes, faith in a future of justice and freedom was a distant and uncertain goal, as he soon lost his illusions regarding the political experience of that «senile century». His poetic work, published in 1873, was titled Cenas Contemporâneas. He also wrote some compositions in French («La chute de Paris», «Les mères francesas», etc.). This realist-romantic had an unstructured thought process, expressing himself in a sometimes careless form. He is also the author of a political study titled Verdades Amargas.