Luís Francisco Bicudo

Azorean poet, from an aristocratic family of São Miguel, he nevertheless professed Republican ideas, having joined Freemasonry while still a student at the Liceu de Ponta Delgada and participated in anti-monarchist activities during his Law studies in Coimbra from 1903 to 1908. After graduating, he enrolled in the Curso Superior de Letras in Lisbon, but soon abandoned the project of continuing his studies there, preferring to travel through Europe, which he did extensively from 1909 to 1912. In the course of this trip he became aware of Italian Futurism through the organ of that movement – the magazine Poesia, published in Milan –, as well as F. T. Marinetti's Manifesto, published in Figaro, Paris, on February 20, 1909, and an interview given shortly afterwards by its author to the French magazine Comoedia, both of which (manifesto and interview) he rendered into the vernacular and quoted in full in an article written in Genoa in July 1909 and published on August 5 of the same year in Diário dos Açores, of Ponta Delgada. In that article he linked Futurism to the «wild philosophy» of Nietzsche («a madman», he said), «whose followers» (among them the Futurists) he considered «hysterical and neurotic products of the century's degeneration». Regarding the «creator of the new literary school» (Marinetti), he reported, however, that he was a «celebrated Italian poet who also wrote brilliantly in French». When he died (committing suicide at 33 years of age), Futurism in Portugal was at its peak (Portugal Futurista had been published months earlier), but his version of that movement's foundational text in Europe (the first in the Portuguese language) remained on the margins of history. For the rest, he himself had not been seduced by the «destructive and incendiary violence» of the Futurist program, remaining faithful to the traditional models in which he had started as a poet in Coimbra around the turn of the century, connected to the vitalist group of the magazine Arte & Vida (1903/1904), of Manuel de Sousa Pinto and João de Barros. His work has remained scattered to this day.