His verse marked a departure from objective realism and social commitment to subjective lyricism and an aesthetic point of view, walking more towards symbolism; one of the various modernist literary currents. The lack of means, aggravated by his father's death, made him morbidly reject the present and the future, following a pessimistic romantic attitude that led him to denounce his tedium. However excessive, this is a controlled attitude, due to a clear aesthetic mind and a real sense of ridicule. He learned the colloquial tone from Almeida Garrett and Júlio Dinis, and also from Jules Laforgue, but he exceeded them all in the peculiar compromise between irony and a refined puerility, a fountain of happiness because it represents a return to his happiest of times — a kingdom of his own from where he resuscitates characters and enchanted places, manipulating, as a virtuoso of nostalgia, the picturesque of popular festivals and of fishermen, the simple magic of toponyms and the language of the people.