Camilo Pessanha

His work Since the poet had the unique talent of re-writing his works from memory and had the habit of giving his poems to close friends, many of his poems had either become lost or inadvertently destroyed. To counter this, Ana de Castro Osório urged Pessanha to place his poems in a single volume. With Pessanha's blessing, João de Castro Osório published Clepsidra (1920). In the years that followed, other poems not included in Clepsidra but attributed to Pessanha appeared in the Portuguese press. Clepsidra eventually came out in a 1945 edition and was radically re-edited in 1956. Gaspar Simões brought to light several more poems and versions of previously published poems as well as Pessanha's translations of Chinese elegies in his A Obra e o Homem: Camilo Pessanha (1967). In 1994, Paulo Franchetti authored a critical edition of Clepsidra including previously unknown fragments.

At first primarily influenced by Cesário Verde and Paul Verlaine, Pessanha became the most pure of Portuguese Symbolists. His poems greatly influenced the Geração de Orpheu from Mário de Sá-Carneiro to Fernando Pessoa.