Álvaro Feijó, Sidónio Muralha e Políbio Gomes dos Santos: Três poetas do desassossego no Novo Cancioneiro

Álvaro Feijó, Sidónio Muralha and Políbio Gomes dos Santos are three Portuguese poets coming into literary age during the 1940s when an important collection of books was published (Novo Cancioneiro) in Portugal’s Salazar. The new poets tried to be involved in the New Realism aesthetic power to overcome Salazar’s social repression and, through a new language far from the individual-driven patterns of late Modernism, they managed to offer a way to translate into verse people’s suffering, poverty and social and political seclusion. Each of the three poets introduced in this article follow a different path after 1944, and that is one reason why they failed as a literary group since they did not work under the very same flag, but they shared the same courage of other senior writers who defied the fascist regime at the same time. The three poets remain almost unknown and untouched in terms of literary criticism until today.