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.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is perhaps the most engaging of the great Western modernists of this century. Born in Portugal but raised and educated in southern Africa, Pessoa wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. George Monteiro provides refreshingly new interpretations of Pessoa's Mensagem (Message) and the modernist novella 0 Banqueiro Anarquista (The Anarchist Banker). But he is primarily interested in tracing Pessoa's influence on a wide range of contemporary writers. Among those Monteiro finds putting Pessoa's work to their own surprising—and sometimes comic—uses are Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, John Wain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and earlier poets including Thomas Merton, Edouard Roditi, and Roy Campbell. In addition, the complete text of Campbell's pioneering biocritical study of Pessoa is published here for the first time.

This bilingual and illustrated edition offers to all English-speaking readers interested in poetry, and in the cultural legacy of Lisbon, verses written by great poets who were born or lived in Portugal's legendary capital city. The globally celebrated Luís de Camões and Fernando Pessoa, along with the latter's heteronyms, are joined by three other poets widely praised within the Portuguese-speaking world—Cesário Verde, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Florbela Espanca—, whom we have the pleasure of introducing to you.

"This book is about how the sea and seafaring shaped literary creativity in early modern Portugal during the most active, consequential decades of European overseas expansion. Josiah Blackmore understands "literary" in a broad sense, including a diverse archive spanning genres and disciplines: epic and lyric poetry, historical chronicles, nautical documents, ship logs and diaries, shipwreck narratives, geographic descriptions, and reference to texts of other seafaring powers and literatures of the period (including works from Spain, Italy, Galician-Portugal, and Catalan). The centerpiece of the book, the great Luís de Camões, is arguably the sea poet par excellence of early modernity, not only of Portugal and Iberia, but of Europe more generally. Blackmore shows that the sea and nautical travel for Camões and his contemporaries were not merely historical realities in early modern Iberia during the age of discovery; they were also principles of cultural creativity that connect to larger critical debates in the widening field of the maritime humanities. For Blackmore, the sea, ships, and nautical travel unfold into a variety of empirical, metaphoric, and symbolic dimensions, and the oceans across the globe that were traversed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correspond to oceans within the literary self, vast reaches and depths of emotion, consciousness, memory, and identity. Thus the sea and seafaring were not merely themes in textual culture but were also principles that created individual and collective subjects according to oceanic modes of perception, nautical modes of thought: a "maritime subject" that was one of the consequences of the sustained practice of navigation and imaginative engagements with the sea throughout the period. Blackmore concludes with a discussion of depth and sinking in shipwreck narratives as metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the maritime subject, foreshadowing empire's decline. The book will be welcomed by students of Iberian literature and culture, the maritime humanities, and those interested in maritime poetics beyond early modernity"--

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.