This study aims to analyse and discuss the notion of “ante-Pessoa”, attributed by Jorge de Sena to Miguel Torga in 1960, a concept that reiterates the more general critical view of Eduardo Lourenço presented in the famous essay “Presença ou a Contra-Revolução do Modernismo Português?” (1958). Considering the intertextuality that some of Torga’s poems, published in Diário (1932-1994), in Penas do Purgatório (1954) and in Orfeu Rebelde (1958), establish with Autopsicografia (1931), a very representative poem of Fernando Pessoa’s poetics, I seek to reveal how Torga’s work on the intellectualisation of emotions relativizes this historiographical commonplace.
