The events on April 25, 1974 found most Portuguese writers politically united in a large antifascist front, well-versed in the art of evading the censorship of Salazar and Caetano with all kinds of tricks, in order to convey their message of protest to a socially conscious audience, able to read the calls for change between the lines. Then it became necessary to learn how to write in freedom.

Freedom of expression fed on the effervescence of class struggle in factories and offices, in the streets and in the country; it fed on ideological disputes within families and in moderate sectors dazed with the spiral of verbal violence from the more radical groups. It is no surprise, then, that the poets, in the works produced on the spur of the moment, expressed their emotions in the plainest language, in sustained harmony with revolutionary dynamics.

This is when writers became different. They had arrived gagged by censorship and the event of the happy turmoil of revolution was for them a bottle of sparkling wine popping its cork in a dark room. The social convulsion had kindled in them the fire of the purposeful word nurtured by ethical imperatives and goaded them to direct intervention in the life of the people. Finally, they saw the apparition of conditions propitious for a creative tranquillity dedicated to free choice, even though the socio-political context in some way became more restrained.

The reversion of the Flower Revolution to its original democratic project, the troubled process of de-colonization, the so-called crisis of ideologies, generated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by the implosion — both geographical and mental — of the soviet empire, will have contributed to the loss of bearings by some of those novelists and poets who had been more inclined to consider their books as material contributions to an irreversible ascension to socialist society. They also constituted phenomena that stimulated many others to rediscover the pleasures of text, inasmuch as they could, after the orgasmic phase of rupture, the appeasement of impulses, the serenity recovered by the inflamed discourse of passion — a process that enabled them to freely conduct their experiments with remarkable effectiveness, considering the results and the quality of the finished work.

The least that can be said is that, if the revolution mobilized the poets in a union favourable to their direct intervention in the life of the community, leading them temporarily to delay their plans for their own fulfilment, those who really had anything to say, outside the frame of revolutionary pragmatism, eventually said it with uncommon brilliance, keeping up the conviction that Portuguese poetry constitutes the literary genre that best represents the genius of this country.

I - Songs and Ballads, Gone With The Wind

We shall begin with the song of intervention inasmuch as it has been the privileged vehicle of poetry at the dawning of freedom. The Revolution, one might say, was born singing, and it has constituted an ideal backdrop for the blossoming of poetry, as it was then understood by men like Carlos Ary dos Santos, Joaquim Pessoa, José Jorge Letria, José Afonso, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, Luis Cília, Manuel Freire, Sérgio Godinho and Francisco Fanhais. Some of those reference names in the sphere of poetry and music have had a great influence in the transformation of the public's taste in the sense of it adhering to poetry as sung, as a weapon against the bourgeoisie. The song was the handier instrument to bring poetry to the people and some of those who already were, or would soon be, consecrated as major voices in the Portuguese poetry of the last few decades, were at that time involved with music in the unique experiment of transforming the material of poetry into a popular matter of necessity and urgency.

José Afonso's song Grandola, Vila Morena, served as a password to trigger the military operations in the early hours of April 25—and Ary dos Santos described it with the following words:

Ary dos Santos had such faith in the "united people" that "never again would be defeated" that he was inspired to make a song-poem based on that famous slogan, imported from revolutionary Chile. Pedra Filosofal, a poem by António Gedeão, written as a eulogy for the future and the transformation of the world, has been heard to the point of satiety in a ballad by Manuel Freire. It was emotional for Natália Correia, on the morning after the disruption, to hear a voice on the radio singing one of her poems that had been banned by the dictatorship, Queixa das almas jovens censuradas (The lament of young censored souls). "Poetry is on the street" was a common saying, in those days of eating stars from the plate of freedom. The responsibility for it lying chiefly with those who had intended poetry to be sung.

Indeed, the festive feeling that emerged in the wake of the Captains' victory gave to sung poetry an echo that nobody ever could have imagined before; one must however accept that its circumstantial function had a precariousness that the evolution of the revolutionary process and the latter trajectory of the poets themselves was to confirm.

The antifascist front of writers did not represent any aesthetic or literary unanimity: it was composed of groups of distinct tendencies that in different ways interpreted their opposition to the dictatorship. In the particular case of the poets, they existed in a variety of hues: the poets of subject matter, those of the vanguard, the obscure, the elegiac, the surrealists, the erotic, the spiritualists, those of the common life, those under foreign influence, those who came in from the colonial war, and even those few who expressed themselves powerfully without any organic link to the mainstream, or even those who assumed the heritage of Pessoa or Cesario Verde.

All of them, united in their opposition to fascism, rejoiced and revelled in the downfall of the old regime, as we can well observe:

-in the poems of a sceptic, cultured, lucid and furious man like Jorge de Sena, dumbfounded in his Californian exile by what was going on in Portugal:

-In the verses of Manuel Alegre alluding to a life for one day lived:

-In the doubts over the legitimacy of the military to establish a regime of freedom, that we read in José Gomes Ferreira; doubts that were cleared as soon as the poet was able to interpret correctly the course of events;

-in the tense, crisp words of José Manuel Mendes

It was soon recognised, however, that problems would emerge once the festival of wonders was over, and that the coming times would witness deep rifts between people equally honest intellectually but deeply diverging over which social and aesthetic courses to pursue. Soon, those poets less inclined to abdicate the assumptions that had assisted them in their earlier work poised themselves, not against freedom nor against democracy, but against the coming of a new totalitarian era, of a regime opposite to that of the former order, capable of sacrificing, to a rhetoric of bureaucratic uniformity, those artists who refused to conform to the model society that was meant to be installed, the equivalent of those systems in other parts of the world.

This struggle developed during the feverish months of turmoil between April 25, 1974 and November 25, 1975, at which later date were carried through those actions of politico-ideological contention through which Portugal returned to the western way, not without some hesitation and fears of losing its identity before the dangers, insinuated both from the left and from the right, of diluting into a European confederation indifferent to national specifications.

Natália Correia, the poet who came to the fore of this fight, was charged with conspiracy for a coup against the left-wingers—but there can be no-one today who would question her loyalty to the values of freedom, as attested by the coherence of her convictions, in her literary work as in the way she fulfilled her role as a member of Parliament.

The tribute of twelve poets to Vasco Gonçalves, the politician-soldier who was one of the visible faces of the forces accused of plotting the resoration of a popular democracy in Portugal, can serve as a counterpoint to Natália Correia's strugggle for freedom: on one hand because it was legitimised by objectives equally edifying — "more justice in society" — on another because, two years after the confrontations of November 1975, some of the general's supporters still found it difficult to understand how the course of History had been turned back. As much as it is clear that partisanship inspired this collection, it is equally clear that some of the poems are of the highest quality, and it has been extremely stimulating to follow the evolution of the best among those "twelve horsemen of the Apocalypse": António Ramos Rosa, Armando Silva Carvalho, Casimiro de Brito, Eduardo Olimpio, Egito Conçalvez, Eugénio de Andrade, Gastão Cruz, José Jorge Letria, José Barreiros, José Ferreira Monte, Maria da Graça Varela Cid and Maria Tereza Horta.