Ignored and misunderstood in his own time, Cesário Verde (1855-86) is today considered the major precursor of modernism in Portugal. A poet of the concrete, with an impressionistic style characterized by the primacy of the senses, Cesário brought into poetry the everyday, the prosaic, and even the ugly. He wrote about common people, disease, oppression, and a new, desacralized woman.
He laid bare the countryside, but also, chiefly, the city. In The Feeling of a Westerner, considered by many to be the greatest Portuguese poem of the 19th century, Cesário masterfully depicts a Lisbon through which he wanders about, bringing us along behind his magnifying glass, in a poetry that travels, revealing scenery, detail, architecture, social codes and dynamics. Fernando Pessoa, one of the major contributors to his posthumous acclaim, dubbed him a master.
Today Cesário shares the ranks of the foremost Portuguese poets and is seen as one of the greatest, most original portraitists of the city of Lisbon and of Portugal.