CAMÔES, LUIS de. — Portuguese poet, b. probably in 1524 at Lisbon and d. there on 10 June 1580. A student first at the University of Coimbra and then at that of Lisbon (1537–42), he was later exiled to the Ribatop for alleged allusions to royal amours in the Auto de El-Rei Seleuco, wounded in combat at Ceuta in 1547, and departed for India in 1553. As a soldier and government official, he encountered many vicissitudes there and, on account of serious and unjust accusations, was even thrown into prison. Finally returning to his homeland in 1570, he ended his arduous life there ten years later.
His greatest work is the poem Os Lusíadas (1,102 octaves distributed among 10 cantos), in which the exploits not of a single hero but of an entire people are exalted, since it celebrates the glorious actions accomplished by Portugal by sea and land: its sole subject is not, therefore, the first expedition to India, as some believed, but all the noble enterprises that preceded and followed it are arranged around this. The historic voyage of Vasco da Gama from South Africa to Mombasa, Melinde, and Calicut, and his return to Portugal, drew together, as an ideal centre, memories and episodes from Lusitanian history: national and medieval elements are harmoniously interwoven, while the medallions reproducing the major moments of national life are inserted among the classical Renaissance elements and those exotic elements bestowed by the enchanted world recently discovered. At the centre of the work stands not Vasco da Gama, whose achievement merely completed the history of navigation, but the Portuguese hero in general, the entire people finding in him its highest expression: the Portuguese greatness of the past is thus set against the mean and sorrowful present. The poem, warlike and maritime, resplendent with patriotic love and fervent lyricism, heroic in tone and marked by intimate religiosity, draws its motifs not only from national literature but also from Spanish literature and, to a considerable extent, from Italian literature, especially from Petrarch, Boccaccio, Tasso, and Ariosto; it brings together ancient and romantic, heroic and historical motifs, chronicle and science, tradition and legend, but is above all faithful to the classical models both in form and style and in its procedures: pagan marvel assumes in that utterly sincere religious writer a new tone which is precisely the plastic expression of such a mental position. In defending the highest moral principles and the greatest virtues, C. utters invocations, reproaches, and maxims of eternal value: a heroic conception of life, a sense of the vanity of every enterprise, and a profound conviction of man’s misery inspire melancholy reflections (one need think only of the “Velho do Restelo” in canto IV, stanzas 24–104), and the verse becomes opaque and sorrowful in its bitter condemnation of the decline of the homeland; and yet the poem, acutely defined by F. de Figueiredo as the “Bible of Lusian patriotism,” is a triumphant hymn of the Renaissance, in which the epic accent nevertheless constantly joins with a profoundly lyrical inspiration.
The Petrarchan lyricism that had received a fervent welcome in Portugal ever since Sá de Miranda found its supreme realization in Camões’s work, with the perfect technical form attained by the sonnet, amid magnificent songs, elegies, odes, sestinas, etc.; in all these compositions every sentiment and passion is expressed with the most delicate elegance, clarity, precision, and harmony, and the lyrics are organized into a canzoniere that is almost a single poem of sorrowful love. To this major production must finally be added what C. wrote for the theatre, namely three autos, Amfirião, El-Rei Seleuco, and Filodemo, in which, departing from classical inspiration, he comes closer to the school of Gil Vicente; nor should the satirical and melancholy nine Cartas be forgotten, among which the Sátira do torneio stands out, along with the Disparates da India, pungent invectives against the misgovernment of the conquerors.