Poesia e história: considerações sobre Fernando Pessoa e Manuel Alegre

Abstract

This article develops some reflections about the intricate relationships between poetry and history. In order to do so, we performs a critical reading of the poem "Os jogadores de xadrez", by Fernando Pessoa - more precisely from his heteronym Ricardo Reis -, and the poem "Lição do arquitecto Manuel da Maia", by Manuel Alegre. Both texts explores the function and limits of poetry in the face of historical catastrophes: the first through reference to a generic war and the second through the destruction caused by the earthquake that struck the city of Lisbon in 1755. The aim is to think about the attitude of alienation, at first sight hostile to the plane of History, present in Pessoa's poem, and the Benjaminian task that assumes the poem of Alegre, centered on the active recovery of the ruins of the past as a form of reinvention of the present.