Portuguese poetry

The beginnings of Portuguese poetry go back to the early 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal separated from the medieval Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this region that the ancestral language of both modern Portuguese and modern Galician, known today as Galician-Portuguese, was the common language of the people. Like the troubadour culture in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into personal insults, as she had hurt her lover's pride. However, this region produced a specific type of song, known as cantigas de amigo (songs of a friend). In these, the lyrical subject is always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about her friend (lover) from whom she has been separated - by war or other activities - as shown in the Reconquista. They discuss the loneliness that the woman feels. But some poems also project eroticism, or confess the lover's meeting in a secret place, often through a dialogue she has with her mother or with natural elements (such could be considered a custom adapted from the pagan peoples in the region). Epic poetry was also produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions (Gesta de D. Afonso Henriques, of unknown authorship). With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics - cantigas de amigo were written even by kings, like Denis of Portugal.

But it was with the Renaissance that poets embarked on a new age of literature due to influences from Italy and the peculiar experience of the Portuguese discoveries. Sá de Miranda (1481–1558) introduced the sonnet, which became, until today, a very common form. But his lyrical works (he also wrote plays) never abandoned traditional forms. He displays a certain antipathy to rapid changes in social structure and values. Bernardim Ribeiro (1482?–1536?) made use of bucolic poetry, singing about love fatalistically (he is more renowned, however, for his prose work Menina e Moça). In the next generation, António Ferreira (1528–1569), making a wide use of classical forms, expresses the same antipathy related to the detriment of society, but with a pedagogical purpose. This was also the time of António Gonçalves de Bandarra (1500–1566), a cobbler who learned to read despite his low social status, and who read the Bible. His songs can be considered the birth of sebastianism, a central theme of Portuguese culture. The Portuguese expansion also gave birth to epic poetry. Jerónimo Corte-Real, with his O Segundo Cerco de Diu (The Second Siege of Diu) should be mentioned, but his classic influence is not well defined. But the great poet, both of lyric and epic, is, unquestionably, Luís de Camões (1525?-1580). He talks about love, the passing of time and world's agitation, using a fine formal dominion, expressing his duality in relation to a platonic view of the world, and a skepticism regarding injustice, the passing of time and the complexity of love. He wrote what is considered the most important poem of Portuguese Literature, Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), singing the maritime voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India. The duality between man and the divine, awareness of the importance of the Portuguese discoveries to the formation of modern world, history of Portugal, the notion of Portugal's social and ideological problems, belief in the evolution on mankind, this is all among the poem's verses.

...
Wikipedia