The dirty streets crowded with workers, housewives shopping, vendors, beggars, tramps, kids playing, pimps, prostitutes and sailors, which would deeply influence his work.

In 1924–25 he worked in Santo António do Zaire and Luanda, Angola, returning to Lisbon in 1925, where he stayed the remaining years as a civil servant up to 1942.

To noise Botto's book, Pessoa wrote a provocative and encomiastic article about Canções, published in the journal Comtemporânea,[2] praising the author's courage and sincerity for shamelessly singing homosexual love as a true aesthete.

Nevertheless, most artists and intellectuals, headed by Pessoa (a close friend of Botto's and also his publisher and later English translator), promptly took up his defence in several polemic articles.

Eventually, the scandal subsided, the next year the ban was lifted and until the end of his life Botto would publish several revised versions of the book.

It's true his work had been saluted by Teixeira de Pascoaes and José Régio, but praises from the likes of Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Stefan Zweig, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce or Federico García Lorca, as he claimed, seem to have been a figment of Botto's very wild imagination.

Botto was described as a slender, medium-height dandy, fastidiously dressed, oval-faced, a tiny mouth with thin pursed lips, strange, scrutinizing, ironic eyes (sometimes clouded by a disturbing malicious expression) hidden by an everpresent fedora.

He was a regular visitor of Lisbon's popular bohemian quarters and the docks, enjoying the company of sailors, a frequent image in his poems.

In spite of a homosexual fame, he had a lifelong and fully devoted common-law wife, Carminda da Conceição Silva Rodrigues, a widow, nine years his elder.

[7] On November 9, 1942[8] Botto was expelled from the civil service for When he read the humiliating public announcement in the official gazette he was totally disheartened, but commented ironically: "Now I'm Portugal's only acknowledged homosexual.

They were a big success, and he was largely praised by several artists and intellectuals, among them Amália Rodrigues, João Villaret and the writer Aquilino Ribeiro.

The press of Rio, São Paulo, Recife, Ceará, Baía, was laudatory about him calling him the greatest Portuguese poet alive and publishing encomiastic articles by well-known Brazilian writers.

He survived on his meager royalties and by writing articles and columns in Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers, doing some radio shows and poetry readings in theatres, associations, clubs and, finally, cheap taverns.

His megalomania (due to syphilis) was rampant and he told delirious, outlandish tales like the one of being visited in Lisbon by Mário de Andrade.

1938 – A Vida Que Te Dei (poemas); Os Sonetos de António Botto (poems) 1940 – O Barco Voador (short stories); Isto Sucedeu Assim (novel) 1941 – OLeabhar na hÓige.

This 815 pages volume also includes the poems Botto wrote for the film Gado Bravo (1934), directed by António Lopes Ribeiro.