The philosophical poetics of Eduardo Lourenço’s essays

Abstract

«Only the poetic word liberates the world» (2016: III, 74), states Eduardo Lourenço in Time and Poetry, one of his most famous essays, dated 1959, among the many he wrote about poetry and Portuguese poets. Eduardo Lourenço’s examination both of Fernando Pessoa’s destabilising poetic thought – e.g. Pessoa Revisited (1973) – and lay existentialist authors – e.g. Situation of Existentialism (1954) Camus’s Tragic Dialecics (1967), Sören Kierkegaard, God’s Spy (1967) – led him towards a predominantly essayistic writing strategy, towards a place of pure interpellation developed from an early age to respond to «calamitous times, like those of Montaigne, precisely in which two orders of opposing and equally impersonal certainties demanded the sacrifice of intellect and will». In today’s times, when marks of many tragedies persist and expand, to revisit Eduardo Lourenço’s poetic hermeneutics is not only intellectually urgent, it is an experience of «beauty and consolation» to resort to the renowned title of a series of television interviews with notable thinkers from the second part of the twentieth century. In our essay, we will highlight passages from Eduardo Lourenço’extensive political and aesthetic reflections on his redemptive and liberating idea of poetry written in the Portuguese language.