A poética de António Botto: corpo, amor e liberdade

Abstract

As a significant part of the criticism was devoted to evaluate the lyric of António Botto based on moral, religious and biographical parameters, a more careful and thorough re-reading of this poet is indispensable today. This research proposes to understand the ways in which public opinion and literary criticism have manifested about verses of a gay identity contrary to the paradigms traditionally represented until that moment in Portuguese society and literature. In order to think more specifically about the homoerotic subjectivity in Botto’s lyric universe, we highlight in the poems the representations of the body and of a queer desire, essential elements in Botto's resistance poetry. Moreover, we try to show how Botto transfigured in a poetic language a form of marginalized subjectivity in Portuguese society, the homoerotic experience, configuring a poetry of resistance and reiterating the independence of art itself, removing it from any servile position