Luís de Camões Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Melczer

Critical Essay by William Melczer

SOURCE: “The Place of Camões in the European Cultural Conscience,” in Empire in Transition: The Portuguese World in the Time of Camões, edited by Alfred Hower and Richard A. Preto-Rodas, University Presses of Florida, 1985, pp. 194-203.

In the following essay, Melczer focuses on the romantic, European discovery of Camões's work in the nineteenth century.

The title of this paper, in which we will look at a few aspects of the European fortune of Camões and of the Lusíadas, requires some further clarification.¹ What follows is intended primarily as a contribution to the study of the prodigious rise of Camões in the firmament of nineteenth-century Europe. I limit myself to that period in the belief that the subsequent and even present-day unquestioned eminence on which Camões stands in Europe has its roots in that nineteenth-century revival.

In the sea of studies dealing with the great Portuguese poet, three works stand...
(read more)