Orpheu’s Modernist Crossroads

The 1915 literary journal Orpheu embraced cosmopolitan nationalism by exploring competing claims to and experiences of modernity. Despite its brief duration, Orpheu has continued to have a significant impact as a literary and artistic manifestation of Luso-Brazilian collaboration and modernist innovation. The journal’s content and its contributors’ correspondence and additional writings reveal an interest in Iberia as key to a broader project of rethinking Portuguese national identity and its cultural place within Europe. This article examines how Orpheu exemplified the contradictory impulses and legacies of Portuguese modernism. After analyzing Orpheu’s two issues with special attention to geographic references and other allusions to spaces beyond Portugal, I broaden my readings to consider Pessoa’s other writings about Iberia. In doing so, I underscore how Orpheu’s cosmopolitan collaboration and Pessoa’s incipient Iberian outlook overlap to emerge as critical manifestations of a Portuguese modernism situated between the world and Iberia.