Luís de Camões is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusíads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, the award-winning translator of The Lusíads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camões's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camões (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.

First published in 1572, The Lusiads is one of the greatest epic poems of the Renaissance, immortalizing Portugal's voyages of discovery with an unrivalled freshness of observation. At the centre of The Lusiads is Vasco da Gama's pioneer voyage via southern Africa to India in 1497-98. The first European artist to cross the equator, Camoes's narrative reflects the novelty and fascination of that original encounter with Africa, India and the Far East. The poem's twin symbols are the Cross and the Astrolabe, and its celebration of a turning point in mankind's knowledge of the world unites the old map of the heavens with the newly discovered terrain on earth. Yet it speaks powerfully, too, of the precariousness of power, and of the rise and decline of nationhood, threatened not only from without by enemies, but from within by loss of integrity and vision. The first translation of The Lusiads for almost half a century, this new edition is complemented by an illuminating introduction and extensive notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524- 1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camões. Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camões's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. The young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems, for example, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from Camões. Herman Melville's reading of Camões bore fruit in his career-long borrowings from the Portuguese poet. Longfellow, T.W. Higginson, and Emily Dickinson read and championed Camões. And Camões as epicist and love poet is an éminence grise in several of Elizabeth Bishop's strongest Brazilian poems. Southern African writers have interpreted and reinterpreted Adamastor, Camões's Spirit of the Cape, as both a symbol of a dangerous and mysterious Africa and an emblem of European imperialism. Recognizing the presence of Camões leads Monteiro to provocative rereadings of such texts as Dickinson's "Master" letters, Poe's "Raven," Melville's late poetry, and Bishop's Questions of Travel.

In this major work, Lewis S. Feuer examines critical distinctions between progressive and regressive imperialism. He explores causes of anti-imperial ideologies, noting that unlike the spoliation that took place under regressive tartar, Spanish and Nazi colonizations, civilization flourished during the progressive imperialism of Hellenic, Macedonian, Roman, and modern British eras of empire-building. Feuer holds that it is erroneous to blame the relative backwardness of colonial peoples on the imperialism of Western democratic nations. In case after case, the character of colonial rulers determined economic development and democratic reform alike. Pursuing the theme of progress versus regression, Feuer compares the imperialism of the United States with that of the Soviet Union – to the detriment of the latter in nearly every instance. His effort constitutes nothing short of a fundamentally new perspective on the lessons of modern history and the mistakes of modern analysts of international affairs. Feuer opens as well a new chapter in political psychology with his study of such anti-imperialist intellectuals as Hobson, Morel, and Leonard Woolf; his portrait of Emin Pasha, the heroic Jewish governor of Equatorial Sudan, suggests a living model for Conrad's Lord Jim.

This Companion surveys over four thousand years of epic poetry in a series of accessible essays.