Manuel Augusto de Amaral

Azorean poet. He attended the Diocesan Seminary of Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira) for some time, but interrupted his studies due to a lack of vocation for ecclesiastical life, subsequently dedicating himself to primary education in Ponta Delgada from 1889 onward, at a school he eventually acquired (the Escola Minerva) and where he worked until reaching the age limit. The Azorean generation to which he belonged, which emerged around the 1880s, included poets such as José Botelho Riley, Garcia Monteiro, José de Lacerda, Filomena Serpa, Manuel António Lino, Alice Moderno, etc., who did not share a strictly generational literary project, following instead in the wake of the Generation of 70, whose lyre (preferably Parnassian) they played—some just as the masters had tuned it, others in a neo-Romantic key, and still others striking Decadentist chords in line with fin-de-siècle taste, thereby drawing closer to the Symbolist generation, which was only slightly younger. These poets shared the same age group as the mainland Portuguese generation comprising Joaquim de Araújo, António Feijó, Luís de Magalhães, Luís Osório, Manuel da Silva Gaio, Queirós Ribeiro, António Fogaça, João Saraiva, Alfredo da Cunha, etc., which displayed more or less the same characteristics. Manuel Augusto de Amaral, for his part, derived his poetry from the sentimental lyricism of João de Deus—with occasional philosophical reflections in the style of Antero—and occasionally lapsed into the Alexandrine eloquence of Junqueiro; yet it was the common people, "the oldest / and truest / Poet of Humanity," of whom he confessed himself a disciple and whose lyrical trail he followed in several volumes of cantigas, containing "verses that the people could well sing as their own," in the words of Pascoaes.