Towards the Concepts of “Poet” and “Poetry” in Sixteenth Century Rhetorical Poetics

Abstract

Recent contributions to Renaissance Studies and Rhetoric promote a review of perspectives in literary history, with broad consequences for the understanding of Camões’s and his contemporaries Poetry. Although there are previous studies, the poetry of Portuguese Quinhentos has not been satisfactorily discussed through the lens of rhetoric as its historical textual pragmatics. A set of changes initiated in the last three decades – coming Historiography, Sociology, Media Studies - brought to light such a gap in the secular matrix of concepts through which “literary periods” and, consequently, poetic texts of the past are understood. This indicates the need to establish epistemically more solid, plausible and situated concepts. This article introduces some questions regarding the semantic field of “poet” and “lyric poetry”, and intends to provide a few topics that may further lead to a more complex comprehension of the pragmatic aspects of poetry in the context of the symbolic production in the 16th Century.