quality:correction, structural:expansion
Overview

Camões' production is divided into three genres: lyrical, epic and theatrical. His lyrical work was immediately appreciated as a high achievement. He demonstrated his virtuosity especially in cantos and elegies, but his redondilhas are not far behind. In fact, he was a master in this form, giving new life to the art of gloss, instilling in it spontaneity and simplicity, a delicate irony and a lively phrasing, taking courtesan poetry to its highest level, and showing that he also knew how to express perfectly joy and relaxation. His epic production is synthesized in ' Os Lusíadas ', an intense glorification of Portuguese feats, not only of his military victories, but also the conquest over elements and physical space, with recurring use of classic allegories. The idea of a national epic had existed in the Portuguese heart since the 15th century, when the navigations started, but it was up to Camões, in the following century, to materialize it. In his dramatic works he sought to fuse nationalist and classic elements.

Probably if he had remained in Portugal, as a courtly poet, he would never have achieved the mastery of his art. The experiences he accumulated as a soldier and navigator enriched his worldview and excited his talent. Through them, he managed to free himself from the formal limitations of courtesan poetry and the difficulties he went through, the profound anguish of exile, the longing for his country, indelibly impregnated his spirit and communicated with his work, and from there influenced in a marked way subsequent generations of Portuguese writers. His best poems shine exactly for what is genuine in the suffering expressed and the honesty of that expression, and this is one of the main reasons that put his poetry at such a high level.

Its sources were numerous. He dominated Latin and Spanish, and demonstrated a solid knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology, ancient and modern European history, Portuguese chroniclers and classical literature, with authors such as Ovid, Xenophon, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Horace standing out, but especially Homer and Virgil, from whom he borrowed various structural and stylistic elements and sometimes even passages in almost literal transcription. According to his quotations, he also seems to have had a good knowledge of works by Ptolemy, Diogenes Laërtius, Pliny the Elder, Strabo and Pomponius Mela, among other historians and ancient scientists. Among the moderns, he was aware of the Italian production of Francesco Petrarca, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Giovanni Boccaccio and Jacopo Sannazaro, and of Castilian literature.

For those who consider the Renaissance to be a homogeneous historical period, informed by classical ideals and extending to the end of the 16th century, Camões is quite simply a Renaissance, but in general it is recognized that the 16th century was largely dominated by a stylistic derivation called Mannerism, which at various points is an anti-classical school and in many ways prefigures the Baroque. Thus, for many authors, it is more appropriate to describe the Camonian style as mannerist, distinguishing it from typical Renaissance classicism. This is justified by the presence of several language resources and an approach to its themes that are not in agreement with the doctrines of balance, economy, tranquility, harmony, unity and invariable idealism, which are the fundamental axes of Renaissance classicism. Camões, after a typically classic initial phase, moved on to other paths and anxiety and drama became his companions. Throughout The Lusiads the signs of a political and spiritual crisis are visible, the prospect of the decline of the empire and the character of the Portuguese remains in the air, censored by bad customs and the lack of appreciation for the arts, alternating with excerpts in which its enthusiastic apology. They are also typical of Mannerism, and would become even more Baroque, the taste for contrast, for emotional flare, for conflict, for paradox, for religious propaganda, for the use of complex figures of speech and preciousness, even for the grotesque and monstrous, many of them common features in Camonian work.

The mannerist nature of his work is also marked by the ambiguities generated by the rupture with the past and by the concomitant adherence to it, the first manifested in the visualization of a new era and in the use of new poetic formulas from Italy, and the second, in the use of archaisms typical of the Middle Ages. Along with the use of formal Renaissance and classicist models, he cultivated the medieval genres of vilancete, cantiga and trova. For Joaquim dos Santos, the contradictory character of his poetry is found in the contrast between two opposing premises: idealism and practical experience. He combined typical values of humanist rationalism with other derivatives of cavalry, crusades and feudalism, aligned the constant propaganda of the Catholic faith with ancient mythology, responsible in the aesthetic plan for all the action that materializes the final realization, discarding the mediocre aurea dear to classics to advocate the primacy of the exercise of weapons and the glorious conquest.