Miguel Street de Arriaga

Poet and playwright, he held a bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Coimbra, graduating in 1850. While a student, he associated with the Ultra-Romantic poets who had published O Trovador or were about to publish O Novo Trovador, and had some of his plays performed by the Teatro Académico. He was later secretary-general of the districts of Aveiro (1850-1852) and Horta (1852-1882). In the latter city he founded, with the poet José Afonso Botelho Andrade, the newspaper O Faialense, which began publication on April 1, 1857, being the second periodical published in Horta (the first, O Incentivo, by João José da Graça, had come out just two and a half months earlier). He retired to Lisbon, where he retired from the Public Administration in 1882. Within Portuguese Romanticism, Vitorino Nemésio places his poetry among the products of the liberal emigration to the islands, pointing him out, meanwhile, as «the first to cultivate a local theme» (cf. Dicionário das Literaturas Portuguesa, Brasileira e Galega, edited by Jacinto do Prado Coelho). He wrote the plays Um Crime and A Condessa e o Caixeiro, the former performed in Coimbra by the Teatro Académico in 1849 and the second printed in installments in O Faialense in 1857, as was, the following year, Júlia Cesarina; Nobreza e Amor, the only one of his dramas published as a book, Horta, 1874; A Filha do Morgado and As Lições de Guitarra, performed in Horta by amateurs in 1879 and 1880, respectively. His biographers Ernesto Rebelo and Urbano de Mendonça Dias also mention the title Beatriz, an alternative for Um Crime, and the unpublished play about Coimbra student customs Salvação e Perdição ou Os Estudantes; poetry: «O canto do baleeiro», in O Faialense, and other scattered works. He translated H.. Longfellow's poem Evangelina, Lisbon, David Corazzi, n.d. (1879), with a preface by Xavier da Cunha.