Selected Shorter Poems

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Luis Vaz de Camoes (ca.1524/25-1580) is reckoned the greatest poet in the Portuguese language, granting him a position in the national literature akin to that of Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe. He wrote a considerable amount of lyric poetry and at least three dramas, but is best remembered for his epic poem Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), which set out to be, and succeeded in being, a Portuguese epic of the nation that can stand alongside Virgil’s Aeneid. As Jonathan Griffin ably demonstrates in this volume, however, his shorter works, mostly sonnets and redondilhas (roundels), are fine lyrics and ought to be given the same serious attention that the epic receives as of right. Little is known of Camoes’ life, other than what we see reported in the Lusiads, but we do know that he served as a common soldier in the East, serving in India, Africa and Macau.