Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lisbon, 19 May 1890 – Paris, 26 April 1916) was one of the most original figures of the Portuguese Modernist movement and a co-founder of its short lived magazine, Orpheu (1915). With unfinished studies in Coimbra and at the Sorbonne, it was in Paris that he wrote his finest poems, depicting his life as an extravagant, frustrated and desperate bohemian young man (a life sponsored by his father). Sá-Carneiro left France after the outbreak of the First World War. But amid a moral and financial crisis, and shortly after a quarrel with his father, he returned to Paris where he spent his last months in deep depression and insurmountable grief. In a letter to his friend Fernando Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro signalled his will to put an end to his life, which he did shortly afterwards, at the age of 25.
