José Agostinho de Macedo (1761–1831),
PortuguesePortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
poet and prose writer, was born at
BejaBeja may refer to:*Beja , a city and municipality*Beja Municipality, Portugal*Beja District, district in Portugal*Beja, Latvia, a town and municipality in Latvia*Beja, a princly state in India, Himachal Pradesh*Béja, Tunisia...
of plebeian family, and studied
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
and
rhetoricRhetoric is one of the arts of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public...
with the Oratorians in
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
. He became professed as an Augustinian in 1778, but owing to his turbulent character he spent a great part of his time in prison,and was constantly being transferred from one
conventA convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...
to another, finally giving up the monastic habit to live licentiously in the capital.
In 1792 he was unfrocked, but by the aid of powerful friends he obtained a papal brief which secularized him and permitted him to retain his ecclesiastical status.
José Agostinho de Macedo (1761–1831),
PortuguesePortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
poet and prose writer, was born at
BejaBeja may refer to:*Beja , a city and municipality*Beja Municipality, Portugal*Beja District, district in Portugal*Beja, Latvia, a town and municipality in Latvia*Beja, a princly state in India, Himachal Pradesh*Béja, Tunisia...
of plebeian family, and studied
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
and
rhetoricRhetoric is one of the arts of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public...
with the Oratorians in
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
. He became professed as an Augustinian in 1778, but owing to his turbulent character he spent a great part of his time in prison,and was constantly being transferred from one
conventA convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...
to another, finally giving up the monastic habit to live licentiously in the capital.
In 1792 he was unfrocked, but by the aid of powerful friends he obtained a papal brief which secularized him and permitted him to retain his ecclesiastical status. Taking to journalism and preaching he now made for himself a substantial living and a unique position. In a short time he was recognized as the leading pulpit orator of the day, and in 1802 he became one of the royal preachers.
Macedo was the first to introduce from abroad and to cultivate didactic and descriptive poetry, the best example of which is his notable transcendental poem
Meditation (1813). His colossal egotism made him attempt to supersede
Luís de CamõesLuís Vaz de Camões is considered Portugal's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. He wrote a considerable amount of lyrical poetry and drama but is best remembered for his epic work Os Lusíadas...
as Portugal's greatest poet, and in 1814 he produced
Oriente, an insipid epic notwithstanding its correct and vigorous verse, dealing with the same subject as the
Os LusíadasOs Lusíadas , usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões ....
, namely
Vasco da GamaDom Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira was a Portuguese explorer, one of the most successful in the European Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India...
's discovery of the sea route to India. This amended paraphrase met with a cold reception, whereupon Macedo published his
Censura dos Lusiadas, containing a minute examination and virulent indictment of Camões.
Macedo founded and wrote for a large number of journals, and the tone and temper of these and his political pamphlets induced his leading biographer to name him the chief libeller of Portugal, though at the time his jocular and
satiricalSatire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although in practice it is also found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods,...
style gained him popular favor. An extreme adherent of absolutism, he expended all his brilliant powers of invective against the Constitutionalists, and advocated a general massacre of the opponents of the
MiguelistMiguel I was the 30th King of Portugal and the Algarves between 1828 and 1834, during the Portuguese civil war.-Early life and...
régime. Notwithstanding hispriestly office and old age, he continued his aggressive journalistic campaign, until his own party, feeling that he was damaging the cause by his excesses, threatened him with proceedings, which caused him in 1829 to resign the post of censor of books for the Ordinary, to which he had been appointed in 1824.
Though his ingratitude was proverbial, and his moral character of the worst, when he died in 1831 he left behind him many friends, a host of admirers, and a great but ephemeral literary reputation. His ambition to rank as the king of letters led to his famous conflict with
BocageManuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage , Portuguese poet, was a native of Setúbal. His father had held important judicial and administrative appointments, and his mother, from whom he took his last surname, was the daughter of a Portuguese vice-admiral of French birth who had fought at the Battle of...
, whose poem
Pena de Taliao was perhaps the hardest blow Macedo ever received. His malignity reached its height in a satirical poem in six cantos,
Os Burros (1812-1814), in which he pilloried by name men and women of all grades of society, living and dead, with the utmost licence of expression. His translation of the
Odes of
HoraceThis article is about the Roman poet Horace. For other uses, see Horace .Quintus Horatius Flaccus, , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:Born in the small town of Venusia in the border region between Apulia and Lucania...
, and his dramatic attempts, are only of value as evidence of the extraordinary versatility of the man, but his treatise, if his it be,
A Demonstration of the Existence of God, at least proves his possession of very high mental powers. As a poet, his odes on
WellingtonField Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, KP, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS , was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the nineteenth century....
and the emperor
AlexanderAlexander III of Macedon, popularly known as Alexander the Great , was an Ancient Greek king of Macedon who created one of the largest empires in ancient history...
show true inspiration, and the poems of the same nature in his
Lyra anacreontica, addressed to his mistress, have considerable merit.
See
Memorias pans la vida intima de Jos+e Agostinho de Macedo (ed. Tb. Braga, 1899);
Cartas e opusculos (1900); and
Censuras a diversas obras (1901).