AGOSTINO della CROCE (da CRUZ). - Portuguese religious, born A. Pimenta, brother of the celebrated poet Diego Bernárdes. Born in Ponte da Barca (Minho) in 1540 or 1542, he entered the convent of Serra de Cintra in 1561. He spent the last period of his life in a dwelling he had built for himself in the Serra da Arrábida, where he lived in seclusion as a hermit. He died in Setúbal in 1619, held in great veneration.
In his youth, A. composed love poems, which he later burned himself. Some were saved, however, and suffice to give us an idea of his passionate and sensitive soul, expressed in sonnets mostly in the Petrarchan and Camonian style. This passion and sensitivity he later transmitted, transformed and purified, into his religious lyric poetry.
The poetic output of A. da Cruz consists essentially of 141 sonnets, 15 eclogues, 19 elegies, some epigrams and odes, as well as an epitaph and three letters. His religious sonnets are preferably in the form of prayers or panegyrics. Among them one admires, for example, fine paraphrases of the Pater, the Ave, the Credo, morning or evening prayers, and the like; the others sing of God, the Crucified, the Virgin, the saints (e.g. St Clare, St John the Baptist) or solemn liturgical occasions. In much of this work there burns a fervent asceticism, which is expressed in plain and harmonious verse, without apology becoming rhetoric and style stiffening into the formulaic content that dogmatic matter often must assume.