The contradictory character and permanent tension with oneself marks Camões’ epic, which we were taught to be a work of pure celebration and praise. This finer analysis of a Camões who raises his voice, critical and disillusioned, amid the backdrop of his epic exaltation, had already been perceived by the best readers of his work, such as Jorge de Sena or Eduardo Lourenço. But a recent and notable book by Helena Buescu (Camões Poet, Hero in the LusíadasTinta da China, 2026), comes to carry out a more in-depth examination of this issue, curiously starting from Keats’ idea about “negative capability” of the poet, which allows him to remain in the midst of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without seeking to clarify them, going beyond facts and reasons, in the sense of Beauty.
It is therefore from a greater romantic perspective that Helena Buescu examines Camões’ work, where the author’s voice constantly intervenes in the epic narrative, introducing conflict and doubt, in a tone of bitterness and disillusionment that contradicts, with the greatest “negative capability”, the exaltation and praise of his epic.
Therefore, the lyric is woven into the Lusíadas with the epic and the poet’s disenchantment contrasts with his praise for the heroisms he came to narrate, disenchantment that has its first moment in the terrible speech of Velho do Restelo, its decisive turning point in the Adamastor episode and which culminates in this desperate stanza, almost at the end of the poem:
What’s more, Muse, what’s more, the Lyre
I have
Untempered and the voice hoarse-
who,
And not from the corner, but from seeing that
I come
Sing to deaf and hardened people:
The favor that lights up the most
the ingenuity
It doesn’t give us the country, no, it’s
stuck,
In the taste of greed, and in rudeness
Duma austere, dull and vile
sadness.
As our author comments: “Thus the poem ends with the conjugation between two apparently contradictory drives, but which are both part of the core of the epic: on the one hand, the future drive, coming from the extraordinary description of Love Island (…). But we have, on the other hand, the melancholic drive, which makes him disbelieve, after all, not only in the “deeds of the Lusíadas”, but, most especially, of their own strength to sing”.
After having seen what he saw in the raw reality of the Empire, what can the poet expect from the exhortation he launches to the young King Sebastian? Not much: “But I speak, humble, low and noisy / Of you neither known nor dreamed of?” But the poet’s final victory is in the poem itself. As Helena Buescu says best: “The poet can finish his epic being aware of his “husky voice”, but what is certain is that the last stanzas still belong to him, as a fascinating combination, which he attributes to himself, of the essential qualities that allowed the achievement of a unique feat: the writing of the epic and, through it, the achievement of immortality”.
There is thus a powerful lyric entangled in this epic, an elegy that haunts the song of glories: this intuition leads Helena Buescu to go further in understanding these doubts and despair, in the understanding that, for her “negative capability“, which the romantics understood, is after all poetry (or Beauty, in Keats’s words) that comes to impose itself on the insoluble contradictions that confront the poet, this “confusion of the world” turned against the “creatures of the earth so small” that are us, humans. It is poetry that prevails against death and disillusionment.
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