In the history of Portuguese literature and art, the term “modernism” generally refers to the production of two generations of writers and artists spanning the period 1914-40. The first generation of Portuguese modernist poets (Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá Carneiro, and José de Almada Negreiros) is closely tied to the short-lived literary review Orpheu (1915); their work evolved out of a late-symbolist aesthetic that explored intensely subjective themes in traditionally metered verse. Members of the group soon succeeded in breaking with these practices, however, and their most celebrated texts often engage with such European avant-garde movements as futurism, simultaneism, and cubism.

The second modernist generation in Portugal is associated with the magazine Presença (1927-40). Members of the Presença group (José Régio, João Gaspar Simões, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and Miguel Torga until 1930) were the first to call attention publicly to the value and importance of the Orpheu generation's literary experiments; they were also the first to refer consistently to the Orpheu poets as “modernists,” implicitly positioning themselves as that generation's literary disciples.