Selected Shorter Poems

Luís Vaz de Camões (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 Lusíadas (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 ...