Portuguese poet. Information about his biography are relatively scarce and unsafe, relying on a limited number of documents and brief references to his contemporaries. The actual date of birth and the place is uncertain, having been deduced from a Royal Charter of Pardon of 1553. His family would Galician ancestry, although it was set in Portugal for centuries before. Believed to be studied at Coimbra, but did not retain any log files in your university.

He served as a soldier in Ceuta, circa 1549-1551, then lost an eye. In 1552, returning to Lisbon, was imprisoned for eight months for having injured in a brawl, Gonçalo Borges, a court official. Date of the following year the Charter of Pardon, linked to the event. That same year, he went to India. In the following years, he served in the East, either as soldiers, sometimes as an employee, thinking that it was in Chinese territory, where he exercised the office of Ombudsman of the Dead and Missing from 1558. In 1560 he was back in Goa, living with some of the important figures of his time (as the Viceroy Dom Francisco Coutinho and Garcia de Orta). In 1569 began the return to Lisbon. The following year, the historian Diogo do Couto, a friend of the poet, found it in Mozambique, where he lived in penury. Along with other former colleagues, got their return to Portugal, where he landed in 1570. Two years later, D. Sebastian gave him a pension, rewarding their services in the East and the epic poem published in the meantime, The Lusiads. Camões died on June 10, 1580, it is said, in misery. However, it is difficult to distinguish what is reality, what is myth and romantic legend, built around his life.

Camões’s work were published in the poet’s life, three lyrics, an ode to the Count of Redondo, a sonnet to D. Leonis Pereira, captain of Malacca, and the epic poem The Lusiads. Were still represented the theater hosts the Comedy, Comedy of Philodemus and Comedy of King Seleucus. The first two parts were published in 1587 and the third, only in 1645, incorporating the volume of Rhymes Luis de Camões, collection of lyrical poems before scattered songbooks, whose assignment to Camões was made, in some cases, without strict scrutiny. A volume that the poet has prepared entitled Parnassus, he was robbed.

In lyric poetry, consisting of roundels, sonnets, songs, odes, octaves, triplets, elegies and eclogues, Camões reconciled the Renaissance tradition (under the influence of Petrarch, the sonnet) with some aspects of Mannerism. In other compositions, used elements of the national opera tradition, which was already a line of troubadours and courtly poetry, such as roundels in “Barefoot to the Source ‘(dedicated to Leonor),” Perdigão lost the feather”(who dedicated one of his black slave). It is the personal tone that has given the trends of inspiration and renewal of the Italian lyric tradition that is part of his genius.
Loom large in poetry poems of love theme, which has sought solution to the many weaknesses in relation to the life and personality of the poet. This is true of her relationship with Dinamene, a beloved Chinese that arises in some of his poems, including the well-known sonnet my gentle soul that you broke, or to other compositions, which illustrate their experience of war and the East like the song Along a dry, hard, barren mountain.
In the treatment of the theme of love you can find not only the adoption of the concept of Platonic love (inherited from Christian tradition and the tradition and influence petrarchist) with the basic principles of identifying the subject with the object of love (Transform- The lover in the beloved thing), cancellation of physical desire (”Tell me the desire, Lady, what you see / do not understand what you ask, is wrong.”) and the absence in order to establish love, but also conflict with the sensual experience that same love. So love comes in the manner petrarchist as a source of contradictions, so well expressed in the justly celebrated sonnet “Love is fire that burns without being seen,” between life and death, water and fire, hope and disappointment, ineffable but, nonetheless, essential to human life. The conception of women, another key theme of the lyric Camões, in close liaison with the love theme and the treatment given to nature (which, classically viewed as smooth and pleasant, it is associated as a source of images and metaphors, as a term Comparative superlativação beauty of women, and in the manner of songs from a friend as a setting and / or confidant of love drama), also oscillates between polar Platonic (ideal of physical beauty, mirror of inner beauty, a manifestation in the sensible world of beauty of the intelligible world) represented by the model for Laura, which is predominant (please refer to the way the sonnets waved gleaming gold threads and a moving eyes, gentle and pious “) and Renaissance model of Venus.
More abstract topics such as the confusion in the world (as in the sonnet “Truth, Love, Reason, Merit or the sparse The good ones have ever seen pass / severe torment in the world), the inexorable passage of time with all the changes involved, always negative in terms of staff (as noted in Camões sonnet “The Times They move, they move their wills), the autobiographical considerations (as in the sonnets my errors, bad fortune, ardent love or The day I was born, Moorish and perish “, which transmit the design hopeless, gloomy, life itself) are other dominant themes of the poetry of Camões.
However, it was with the Lusíadas that Camões, although posthumously achieved glory. Epic poem, following the classical and Renaissance models, aims to establish for posterity the great deeds of the Portuguese in the East. Taking advantage of the Greek-Roman mythology, merging it with Christian elements, which at the time and even later, generated some controversy, Camões describes the voyage of Vasco da Gama, taking it as a pretext for telling the story of Portugal , alternating episodes with other narratives of nature more lyrical, as in the case of the “Beautiful Inez.” The Lusiads came to be regarded as the great national epic poem. Every work of Camões, moreover, influenced the later Portuguese literature, particularly so during the Romantic period, creating many myths attached to their life, but also at other times, including the current one. In the nineteenth century, some writers and thinkers realistic collaborated in preparing the commemorations of the third centenary of his death, claiming that the figure of Camões would allow a political and spiritual renewal of Portugal.

Widely translated and admired, is considered by many to figure in the Portuguese language and literature. They are a compendium of his rhymes (1595, lyrical work), the hosts of Auto, Auto Philodemus (1587), the Self of King Seleucus (1645) and The Lusiads (1572)