Queirós Ribeiro

While his birth in the Beira region was accidental, Queirós Ribeiro is a poet of the Lima region through his forebears, his childhood and adolescence, his marriage and family homes, his emotional attachment to the Alto Minho, and the influence that the landscapes and authors of that region came to have on his work. A compatriot of Feijó, he belonged to the Coimbra generation in which Feijó and another mutual friend, Luís de Magalhães, held sway with their Revista Científica e Literária, ostensibly of a positivist and Parnassian orientation. However, while the Coimbra experience left nostalgic ("Última noite") and humorous ("A José Monteiro") traces in Queirós Ribeiro's debut book—Tardes de Primavera, 1889—it immediately laid out an anti-Parnassian, neo-Romantic poetics and made it abundantly clear that the master of Queirós Ribeiro's poetry was, beyond the paradigmatic Victor Hugo (from whom nine poems were then translated), Guerra Junqueiro. Junqueiro prefaced the work with a letter in verse, subsequently appeared as the subject of two apologetic poems, and left his mark on several poems in "Folhas dispersas," singing of an irrepressible and unattainable love for the archetypal woman ("Quimera"), exalting para-pantheistic religiosity and the euphoria of transformism ("Mater admirabilis," "Eterno poema"), and allegorically attacking Jesuitism ("Símbolos"). Tardes de Primavera, whose formal refinement was recognized by the very Fialho who in Vida Irónica excoriated the idealizing sublimation of amorous song, has fortunate moments, such as "Contrastes" or "Mudanças"; it also foreshadowed Cinzas (1896) through the ambitious scope of its first part, "Ideal perdido," and because this macrotext evoked a "first passion" cut short by the early death of his beloved. Indeed, having married after graduating in Law, Queirós Ribeiro was widowed very soon afterward and created Cinzas specifically as a "lyric poem" of that bereavement, its aesthetic and literary orientation directly guided by the prelude: "Heart, you are my school." A good orator and a representative figure of his region and generation, Queirós Ribeiro found success as a deputy who, allied with Alpoim, naturally emerged in a prominent position during the Progressive dissidence; this facet of his persona is preserved in his Discursos Parlamentares (1908). Moreover, a travel enthusiast and regular contributor to the press, he left these aspects illustrated by his Cartas de Longe (1911), originally published in O Primeiro de Janeiro. But his poetic creation resumed, and in 1903 Queirós Ribeiro published the collection Pedras Falsas, which the final sonnet defines as a "necklace of cut stones / By the hands of Tenderness and Grief. / [...] / Poor string of curdled tears [...]". In Pedras Falsas there is a tendency toward self-deprecation against the backlighting of "Ideal perdido" (Tardes de Primavera) and Cinzas; yet the book's exploration of light imagery is enough to render this self-devaluation unjustified. However, even then, and despite the repetition that Folhas Mortas (1916) would represent, the dramatic poem Caminho do Céu was already heralded, along with the significant shift that Queirós Ribeiro's poetic inspiration would undergo from then on. An uneven poem in six cantos symbolically titled "A Névoa," "A Chama," "As Nuvens," "O Luar," "A Aurora," and "O Sol" in reference to the mythic-literary figures of Laura, Héloïse, and Beatrice, and the evangelical figures of Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, in dialogue with whom the "Poet" achieves an artistic and mystical ascent. Testifying to the result of this religious exaltation are the books of edification and Catholic apologetics to which Queirós Ribeiro would henceforth dedicate himself: the versicles in which he rendered the Imitação de Cristo (1925) into the vernacular and in an aesthetic mindful of the simplicity of Christian spiritualism; the monumental paraphrase in redondilha of the Gospel narrative of the Vida de Jesus (1927); an announced Poema Eucarístico—flanked by the reflections in Máximas e Pensamentos. By then, his loyalty to monarchist convictions having already driven him into exile (1919), his poetry of religious militancy mirrored Queirós Ribeiro's involvement in the public Catholic movements that marked the end of the First Republic (participating, for example, in the Braga Eucharistic Congress of 1924).