Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage

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Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage
BornManuel Maria Barbosa l'Hedois du Bocage
(1765-09-15)15 September 1765
Setúbal, Portugal
Died21 December 1805(1805-12-21) (aged 40)
Lisbon, Portugal
Pen nameElmano Sadino
OccupationPoet
NationalityPortuguese
Literary movement
Notable worksA Morte de D. Ignez
A Pavorosa Illusão
A Virtude Laureada
Elegia
Improvisos de Bocage
Mágoas Amorosas de Elmano
Queixumes do Pastor Elmano Contra a Falsidade da Pastora Urselina

Manuel Maria Barbosa l'Hedois du Bocage (15 September 1765 – 21 December 1805), most often referred to simply as Bocage, was a Portuguese Neoclassic poet, writing at the beginning of his career under the pen name Elmano Sadino.

Biography

Bocage at around 20 years old

Bocage was born in the Portuguese city of Setúbal, in 1765, to José Luís Soares de Barbosa and Mariana Joaquina Xavier l'Hedois Lustoff du Bocage, of French family.

Bocage began to make verses in infancy, and being somewhat of a

Portuguese navy. He proceeded to the Royal Marine Academy in Lisbon
but instead of studying he pursued romantic adventures. For the next five years he had numerous love affairs, and his retentive memory and extraordinary talent for improvisation gained him a host of admirers and turned his head.

Brazilian

Damão, India; but he promptly deserted and made his way to Macau, where he arrived in July–August. According to a contemporary tradition, much of "Os Lusíadas" had been written there, and Bocage probably travelled to China following in the footsteps of another classic Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões, to whose life and misfortunes he loved to compare his own. Though he escaped the penalty of his desertion
, he had no resources and lived on the charity of friends, whose help enabled him to return to Lisbon in the middle of the following year.

Statue at Setúbal, Portugal

Once back in Portugal he regained his old popularity, and resumed his vagabond existence. The age was one of reaction against the

William Beckford, the author of "Vathek
", for instance, describes him as a "pale, limber, odd-looking young man, the queerest but perhaps the most original of God's poetical creatures. This strange and versatile character may be said to possess the true wand of enchantment which at the will of its master either animates or petrifies."

In 1797 enemies of Bocage belonging to New Arcadia denounced him to Manique, who on the pretext afforded by some anti-religious verses, the Epistola a Marilia, along with accusations of immorality, arrested him when he was about to flee the country and flung him in the Limoeiro jail, where he spent his thirty-second birthday. His sufferings induced him to a speedy recantation, and after much importuning of friends, he obtained his transfer in November from the state prison to that of the

Freemasons
enabled him to survive, and a purifying influence came into his life in the shape of a real affection for the two beautiful daughters of D. António Bersane Leite, which drew from him verses of true feeling mixed with regrets for the past. He would have married the younger lady, D. Anna Perpétua (Analia), but his earlier excesses had ruined his health.

In 1801 his poetical rivalry with Macedo became more acute and personal, and ended by drawing from Bocage a stinging extempore poem, Pena de Talião, which remains a monument to his powers of invective. In 1804 the illness (

Duke of Alva
's army. The gulf that divides the life and achievements of these two poets is accounted for less by difference of talent and temperament than by their environment, and illustrates the decline of Portugal in the two centuries that separate 1580 from 1805.

To Beckford, Bocage was a powerful genius, and Link was struck by his nervous expression, harmonious versification and the fire of his poetry. He employed every variety of lyric and made his mark in all of them. His roundels are good, his epigrams witty, his satires rigorous and searching, his odes often full of nobility, but his fame must rest on his sonnets, which almost rival those of Camões in power, elevation of thought and tender melancholy, though they lack the latter's scholarly refinement of phrasing. So dazzled were contemporary critics by his brilliant and inspired extemporizations that they ignored Bocage's licentiousness, and overlooked both the superficiality of his creative output and the artificial character of most of his poetry. In 1871 a monument was erected to the poet in the main square in Setúbal, and the centenary of his death was observed there with great ceremony in 1905.

Perhaps because of the sheer rudeness of some of his verse Bocage is still a genuinely popular figure today, and not only in Setúbal. The subversiveness of his poems has meant that for much of the last 200 years they have not been (officially) available in Portugal: his erotic poetry was first published anonymously towards the end of the 19th century.

See also

Sources

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Prestage, Edgar (1911). "Bocage, Manuel Maria Barbosa de". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 101.

Free translation of a poem where Bocage draws his self-portrait.

External links

See also …
Media at Wikimedia Commons
Works at Domínio Público
Works at Dominio Público
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