| Summary: | Eugénio de Castro’s artistic and cultural persona and his poetic work are intimately connected to the turn of the century, in an unusual interaction with the European and American literary scene and, particularly, with an unprecedented net of connections with the “International Symbolism”, but also with an ever present and tenacious effort of hetero-self author peculiar use of books and suggestions for the construction of his own literary idiolect – capere, non capi. Decades later, the literary history critics were still qualifying his poetry as “New Poetry”. In that fin de siècle period, the image of the “aesthete” becomes paradigmatic; and from its ideal an arduous and bold commitment is inseparable, in an intervention strategy to literature’s institutional functioning according to the rules of aristocratism and the originality paroxysms. Eugénio de Castro stands out as the first and model example of that guidance, proved not only pro tempore by critical supports and parodists, controversies and polemic disputes but also by 19th century studies.
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