José Maria do Couto Severim

Azorean poet of the Ultra-Romantic school. In his life, which was brief, his thwarted love affairs with a young woman from the São Miguel Jewish colony deserve mention (for being romantic); he abducted her according to the customs under such circumstances (with the victim's connivance) and married her. Aside from this, he was an employee at the Ponta Delgada Customs Office and died of consumption at age 35. In his youth, he frequented Castilho's literary circle during the poet's stay in São Miguel (1847-1850), having at that time (1849) taken a versification course taught by the author of Cartas de Eco e Narciso himself, where he was a fellow student of Filipe de Quental, Antero's uncle, and other young men, such as José Joaquim de Oliveira Machado Júnior, Luís Filipe Leite, and Pedro Eusébio Leite, who were listed there as «most distinguished students» (cf. Memórias de Castilho, vol. V, p. 132). Later, along with Guilherme Read Cabral, Luís Filipe Leite, etc., he was part of the Grémio Trovador, one of the literary associations formed in the wake of Castilho's influence on the São Miguel intellectual milieu. He contributed to several local periodicals (among them Revista dos Açores, directed by José de Torres), but did not publish his work in book form. Posthumously, Teófilo Braga published some of his poems in Grinalda, from Porto (1870). Far from the «hustle and bustle of the world», he strummed the «strings of the nostalgic Lyre» to sing of the «pale disc» of the Moon, the «thousand charms of night / wrapped in its veil», like a «melancholic virgin», «hopes [...] / that died in bloom» mowed down by «cruel fate», «life floating undecided / drifting between pain and bitter suffering», a «love so pure and holy» that «the cloud of indifference / shrouded in grief», and similar bitterness characteristic of and expressed according to the clichés of Ultra-Romanticism.