António Feliciano de Castilho was born in Lisbon in 1800. He was near-blinded by measles at the age of 6, but with the assistance of one of his brothers managed to graduate in canon law at the University of Coimbra in 1826.

In 1836, after many years of study, Castilho published A noite do castelo (“The night of the castle”) and Os ciúmes do bardo (“The bard’s jealousy”), two poems in decasyllabic lines that established a doom-laden, high-Romantic aesthetics. In the same year, the poet translated Lamennais’ progressive, republican and liberationist Paroles d’un croyant.

In 1841, Castilho founded the Revista universal lisbonense, a weekly magazine to which renowned Romantics like Garrett contributed: the influential Viagens na minha terra (“Travels in my homeland”) were published in instalments in the Revista universal between 1843 and 1846.

Disappointed in his educationalist endeavours (Método português, a reading method, 1850) and his political ambitions, Castilho retired with his family to Ponta Delgada, Azores, where he continued to ponder popular education and the state of the countryside. Between 1848 and 1849, he published a series of chronicles in a local newspaper, later compiled in Felicidade pela agricultura (“Happiness through farming”), advocating physiocracy, women’s emancipation and suffrage. More pedagogical was his 1851 Tratado de metrificação portuguesa (“Treatise of Portuguese versification”), a guide to metric composition in poetry. Two years later, he was appointed Commissioner-General of Public Instruction and created national courses for teachers’ training.

In 1865, Castilho triggered the Questão Coimbrã (“Coimbra Controversy”) when, in a preface to a book of poems written by Pinheiro Chagas, he accused some progressive young writers of lacking “good sense and good taste”. In the ensuing quarrel, two factions were involved: one led by Castilho, an established practitioner of an excessive sentimentalism and particularly fond of mutual praise, the other by Antero de Quental and Teófilo Braga, two Liberal university students who attacked drooping Romanticism as a sign of social backwardness and cultural ignorance.

Castilho’s early classical influence reasserted itself at the end of his life, when he translated Anacreon, Ovid and Virgil’s Georgics. He also translated Molière’s Tartuffe, Le misanthrope, L’avare and Le médecin malgré lui as well as, controversially, Goethe’s Faust (from a French version). One of the last Romantics, he died in Lisbon in 1875.