SOURCE: “Camoens,” in The Inspiration of Poetry, The Macmillan Company, 1910, pp. 58-84.

In the following essay, Woodberry describes Camões's personality and the degree to which his character and imagination inform The Lusiads and his lyric poetry.

Camoens, the maker of the only truly modern epic, offers an illustration of poetic power which is to me one of the most interesting, although the foreignness of his subject-matter and the extraordinary lameness of its English translations make difficult obstacles to our appreciation; but for that very reason he has the happiest fortune that can fall to a poet in the fact that familiarity ever endears him the more. He is a less pure type of the flame of genius than Marlowe; poetic energy appears in him less a spiritual power dwelling in its own realm of imagination; but, on the other hand, his career admits us to a nearer...