Portuguese poetry

The beginnings of Portuguese poetry go back to the early 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal separated from the medieval Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.

[2] Like the troubadour culture in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into personal insults, as she had hurt her lover's pride.

In these, the lyrical subject is always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about her friend (lover) from whom she has been separated - by war or other activities - as shown in the Reconquista.

But some poems also project eroticism, or confess the lover's meeting in a secret place, often through a dialogue she has with her mother or with natural elements (such could be considered a custom adapted from the pagan peoples in the region).

Epic poetry was also produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions (Gesta de D. Afonso Henriques, of unknown authorship).

With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics - cantigas de amigo were written even by kings, like Denis of Portugal.

In the next generation, António Ferreira (1528–1569), making a wide use of classical forms, expresses the same antipathy related to the detriment of society, but with a pedagogical purpose.

He wrote what is considered the most important poem of Portuguese Literature, Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), singing the maritime voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India.

Such epic cycle ended with the poem Viriato Trágico, by Brás Garcia de Mascarenhas, who fought in the Portuguese Restoration War.

Crises made national cultural factors collapse: romantic nostalgia was applied to Portuguese decline, the rest of Europe being considered the real focus of civilization.

The most renowned are: Alberto Caeiro, considered the master of them all, positivist and bucolic, Ricardo Reis, pagan and epicurist (but with stoical influence), Fernando Pessoa's autonym, trapped in his interior labyrinth and tedium, Álvaro de Campos, futurist, and Bernardo Soares, who wrote Livro do Desassosego (Book of Disquiet).