“In accordance with the laws of beauty”: elevation and evolution in a sonnet by Antero de Quental

Abstract

This study examines the sonnet “Evolução” (1886), wrote by the Portuguese poet Antero de Quental, in regards to the moment of its making, when the theme of evolution had not only pressured the philosophical systems, religious postulates and social conventions, but had already received a political-philosophical interpretation which would become hegemonic in the second half of the 19th Century: Social Darwinism. Seen within this determined configuration, this sonnet, as well as many others found in Quental’s works, seems to take the opposite path of such naturalist tendency. Here we investigate the logic behind such dissonance between the poem and its time, focusing on the hypothesis that the theme of evolution in Antero’s sonnet is artistically composed “in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx, 2004) and, therefore, escapes idealism and naturalism and, thus, elevates evolution to its real dimension in history.