The present work aims to analyze the presence of a structure of tragic feeling in the poetics of Antero de Quental, representative of Portuguese Realism and Augusto dos Anjos, a Brazilian poet whose departmentalization in an aesthetic school generates difficulties and disagreements among the main Brazilian literary critics. We argue that a desperate Kierkegaardian consciousness constitutes this tragic structure that makes the literary production of both poets a tragic synthesis of the annihilation of the individual and the human species, the implosion of subjectivity and the idea of ''humanity reduced to nothing. From the cultural thesis coined by Raymond Williams, within the English Cultural Studies, we perceive the concept of the structure of feeling as a cultural hypothesis, an attempt to understand the social emergents that express themselves through new ways of feeling and thinking before the feelings already fully articulated in the institutions of a given period.