Poets do not live on daisies: the matter of money on the Portuguese romantic poetry

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, Portugal witnessed the professionalization of the writer, who is forced to sell their works on the market. In this essay we evaluated how the relations between poetry and value, money and poverty, work and poetic composition appear in the poems. Also, we aim to investigate how some romantic poets position themselves on these issues in their poems. We start our analysis on the three main figures of the first generation: Almeida Garrett (1799- 1854), Antonio Feliciano de Castilho (1800-1975) and Alexander Herculano (1810-1877), then, we observe the work of Gomes de Amorim (1827-1891), then known as the “poet-worker”, and we verify if his social situation interferes with his poetry.