Portuguese involvement in the Colonial Wars, never officially acknowledged as a war, had its aesthetic register in narrative (more than one hundred novels) and poetry. There is currently a lack of attention, systematization and analysis of poetry by authors directly and indirectly involved in the war, written both during and immediately after the conflict, as both direct memory and a post-traumatic elaboration. This project aims to bring together the first exhaustive critical collection of every sort of poetic material, not just as war poetry in the western, and particularly Portuguese literary panorama, but also as a valuable subjective testimony to one of the most significant episodes in Portuguese twentieth-century history, an event that changed the very identity of Portugal. In order to delimit such a fluid and difficult corpus, we will lay out selection criteria that will allow us to extract from the multiplicity of Colonial War poetry a textual corpus that takes account of the themes, forms and characteristics of such a production.